The Resistance Girl

by Jina Bacarr

  I don’t judge her.

  Movie star. Wardrobe girl.

  We’re both mothers and our children come first.

  Halette also comes to my rescue with doll clothes. I insist she remain with me at the Trocadéro apartment and together we make the trek to the deserted doll and candle shop. The Germans weren’t interested in doll clothes when they ransacked the place. We have fun dressing up my baby to look like the perfect doll she is, both of us laughing and playing with ma petite Madeleine.

  A diversion.

  A way to pretend everything is all right, when it isn’t.

  The news I’ve dreaded comes in the middle of the night… and I fall to pieces.

  Three a.m.

  A knock at the door.

  I grab my white silk kimono, tie it around me, and rush to open it.

  Jock, I pray?

  No, it’s—

  ‘Bertrand, mon cher ami, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Let me in, Sylvie… quick before anyone sees.’

  He rushes by me, almost knocking me down, and collapses on the divan. I gasp when I see a trail of blood on the parquet floor.

  ‘You’re wounded… let me get you some towels, hot water.’ His left arm hangs limp. It’s then I see a gash in his shoulder where a bullet entered and made a clean exit on the other side.

  ‘Forget me. Get dressed and take the baby and Halette to the Hôtel Ritz. You’ll be safe there.’

  ‘Why, Bertrand?’ I ask, not understanding. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We were set up. That SOE agent Jock picked up in Angers… he was an Abwehr agent. He used Jock to make contact with our Resistance group. He may have followed him here at some point before we rendezvoused in the Bois.’

  ‘Where’s Jock?’ I take heavy breaths, my lungs bursting. The Bois de Boulogne is less than two kilometers from here. A twenty-minute walk. I don’t have a good feeling about this. ‘Where is he?’

  His face contorts with pain, but Bertrand won’t look me in the eye.

  ‘The agent kept insisting he could supply us with weapons to launch our offensive against the Nazis. We need guns, ammo. We met him at the designated spot deep in the wooded area not far from here where the arms would be delivered. When the tarpaulin-covered truck arrived, German soldiers jumped out and opened fire.’

  My hand goes to my throat. ‘A trap.’

  ‘Oui. Before I knew what was happening, a bullet smashed into my shoulder. The Nazi was ready to finish me off when Jock lunged at him and the bastard fired his rifle.’

  ‘Oh, God, no…’ I sink to the floor. This is a bad dream, it has to be.

  ‘Jock died protecting me, Sylvie.’

  ‘No… I don’t believe it… I can’t.’ I choke out a sob, then a groan so deep down inside me I can’t catch my breath.

  ‘Somehow I pulled myself to safety behind some bushes then escaped. The others didn’t. They mowed them down and tossed grenades into the pile of bodies to cover up their tracks.’ He holds me with his good arm, grabbing my hair in his fist, the blood from his shoulder wound seeping into the silk of my white kimono and turning it red.

  His blood.

  My pain.

  Jock, mon amour… you can’t leave me. Not now.

  I can’t move. My arms feel leaden, my legs numb. It’s only when Bertrand squeezes me so tight and I feel pain do I come alive again, his hot breath blowing in my ear as he whispers, ‘Jock loved you and the baby more than anything, Sylvie.’ He gives me an uneasy smile. ‘I wish it had been me who took that bullet.’

  ‘Don’t talk… I’ll wake Halette and we’ll get your wound cleaned up.’ I struggle to keep my voice calm… a choking feeling in my throat… hands trembling as I check the wound again, then my whole body trembles. He can’t die… he can’t! Not both of them. What insanity rules this world when in the cause for freedom, the most willing to die for it always do?

  A damning resolution to help this man sparks my muscles to move, do what must be done. Then I shall deal with this horrible pain that’s left such a gaping hole in me.

  I rush upstairs, my hand covering my mouth to keep from screaming, my bare feet tapping on the winding staircase, but my heart has flown somewhere else.

  Out there in the Bois with my love.

  I wake the sleeping girl, tell her Bertrand is wounded and needs our help. I say nothing about Jock… I can’t, not when I don’t believe it myself.

  ‘Bertrand is a good man,’ she says, her pretty face going pale. He’s been like a father to her since Raoul was sent to the camp. ‘I’ll get some towels.’

  I nod. Grab soap, a basin for hot water, then I rush down the staircase.

  I’m too late.

  Bloodspots trail to the open back door leading to the veranda.

  He’s gone.

  My husband is dead.

  The beloved rogue in the white dinner jacket with the black bow tie I met in Monte Carlo, the downed flier turned brave Resistance fighter, the father of my baby.

  Caught in a mad skirmish with the enemy saving his friend. My friend.

  My breath comes in short gasps, my hands shaking. I go through the motions, doing what Bertrand asked. He wouldn’t risk coming here if he didn’t believe I was in danger.

  I sent Halette to the Hôtel Ritz last night before curfew with two suitcases filled with extra clothes, personal items. Disguises. (Fantine, a nurse, and a nun.) It’s best if we’re not seen together. If anyone asks, she’s a lady’s maid, bringing her mistress a change of wardrobe. She has the key. As long as she enters the hotel on the Rue Cambon side, she’ll be fine.

  I’m not so fine.

  I need time to myself, to think. To grieve.

  Yet all I can do is think about the sweltering August heat.

  Suffocating, invasive, draining me so I can no longer feel. I don’t want to feel. I want to die. I’m no longer the actress playing a part in a movement bigger than I am. I want nothing to do with this horrible, miserable war. I want to be a wife, a mother, a lover.

  I want him back.

  My husband.

  But he’s gone. Big, ugly sobs escape my throat. I want to claim his body, hold him one last time.

  I can’t. I can’t even give him a proper burial. Now I know how the women in the boxcar felt, women on their way to a concentration camp which meant certain death for so many. For those who do survive, no closure. No place to lay a gentle rose and touch the cold stone bearing the name of your husband that warms under your fingertips. As if his spirt knows you’re there and touches you with his enduring love. Telling you to be at peace.

  For me, for those women, there is no peace.

  This war stole that from us. I’m angry, bitter, and want to grab a pistol and join them at the barricades. Fight till the end… I want vengeance.

  Until the sound of my baby’s cry reaches my ears.

  Not the anxious cry when she’s hungry, the irritated cry when she’s wet, but a deep, penetrating wail that begs me not to be bitter, not to hate, but to remember the love Jock and I had for each other that brought her into this world.

  I pick up my dearest angel and rock her back and forth, my voice a harsh whisper as I hum to her. I kiss her chubby cheeks, nestle her close to my breast so she can hear my heartbeat as I take slow, steady breaths. Soon our hearts beat as one as mine did with Jock’s. A time I shall remember always when in the face of war and hate, we owned that special place lovers do, a place when a deep, tender love finds a permanent place in the heart that can never be taken away.

  I listen to her tiny breaths. She sleeps so soundly.

  Perhaps that’s a blessing.

  Mais oui, perhaps it is, I tell myself as I pack a few things, my brain swirling with questions and new fears as dawn comes and brings with it more heartbreak.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Sylvie, I know you’re working with the Resistance.’

  Emil.

  Using a threat that once would have caused me to panic, but that young girl of sixteen, that in
secure actress, they’re both gone. I’ve changed. I’m the widow of a Resistance fighter, stronger now because of Jock.

  I’m also hiding out.

  I entered the Hôtel Ritz three days ago dressed in a light summer frock with a big brim straw hat, billowy scarf flying behind me as I walked quickly through the Rue Cambon entrance, past the bar, then took the tiny, oak-paneled lift to my floor. I made a point of tossing my long scarf over my shoulder as a diversion from the oversized carrying bag I clutched in my hand, praying the whole time Madelaine wouldn’t wake up from her nap.

  Earlier I wrapped my child in blankets and laid my lace veil over the carryall as one would do to a pram. Keeping the baby out of sight.

  The staff ignored me. I’m not naïve to believe they don’t see me. It’s the hotel credo to see, hear everything that goes on while being discreet.

  Emil’s appearance will be duly noted.

  ‘What do you want, Emil?’

  I push aside the peachy chiffon curtain and look out the window down at the garden below in full bloom. A good sign? I hope so.

  ‘You’ve got influence with the partisans to get me out of Paris before the Allies come.’

  ‘No gas for your Citroën?’ I toss back at him.

  He ignores my sarcasm. ‘You know I have to bend the rules to get my pictures made… and… well, not everyone respects my talents like you do.’

  I snicker. ‘Who’d did you rip off this time? Phony gold watches to the SS?’

  ‘That’s not funny, Sylvie. The Nazi staff at Avenue Foch are destroying files. What if they leave a few behind? I’m ruined. Or dead. Or both.’

  I turn and see a man who is nothing more than broken shell, a man who for all the years I’ve known him, has never shown emotional attachment to anyone, anything.

  Till now.

  He begs me to remember our years together, how he discovered me, the hits we made. I let him sweat, as he twists his Panama hat in his hand, then get him to admit he’s been working his black market connections to line his pockets with francs and Reichsmarks. That he got involved with a gang of thugs who were part of the French Gestapo, a network supplying Germans with luxury goods. He claims he knew nothing about their involvement with the SS, giving up Jews and betraying résistants.

  ‘I know you tried to help Raoul and you’re hiding his daughter. You must have connections with the Underground.’

  How long has he known?

  Somehow he’d put the pieces together. Does he know about Bertrand? I haven’t seen mon cher ami since that night he came here, wounded. I’m grateful Halette isn’t here to witness his spewing. I let her take Madeleine to the walled garden near the dining room so they could both get some fresh air.

  ‘Why didn’t you expose me?’ I ask.

  ‘Because I’ve always loved you like a daughter, Sylvie,’ he says, tears in his eyes.

  ‘Oh, really?’ I roll my eyes.

  ‘You don’t believe me, but it’s true. I have to get out of Paris before my dirty laundry list of sins falls into British and Americans hands.’

  ‘And if I don’t help you?’ I want to know.

  He puffs out his chest. ‘Then you leave me no choice. I will report you to the Gestapo as a member of the SOE.’

  Every muscle in my body tightens. The sudden racing of my pulse wipes out any rational logic I had. We both know it’s not too late for the Gestapo to arrest me and take my baby. With the liberation of France in the wind, the SS is seeking out and executing SOE agents.

  I try a different tactic.

  ‘I have nothing to fear. The Gestapo won’t believe you.’

  Herr Geller is dead. That’s in my favor.

  ‘Are you willing to take that chance?’ Emil says, smug. ‘Or would you prefer I buy my way out of this mess when I give you up to the Allies, tell them how you collaborated with the enemy.’

  ‘When the Allies come,’ I insist, ‘they’ll believe me when I tell them about my work with the Resistance.’

  ‘Will they? You always were too trusting, Sylvie, or else you never would have allied with an old bastard like me.’

  I’ve always believed I controlled my destiny.

  Unfortunately, Emil is right. I don’t. I have no choice but to get him out of Paris. But how? Our Resistance movement has joined up with a bigger movement under General de Gaulle, I discover when I become Fantine (I don’t explain to Halette, she doesn’t ask, and I make the daring move to leave by the Vendôme entrance of the hotel swarming with Nazis too busy to notice an old woman with a limp).

  I also find out Bertrand is dead.

  In spite of the sizzling undercurrent in the city, the bells in the great cathedral remain silent till the fight is won, the amassing of arms and men around her graceful Gothic curves growing. I see none of it. Despair takes root in me along with an eerie wistfulness that makes me feel as if I’m floating. A passionate longing to go back to the way things were inhabits my soul for too brief a time. Then a loud sound zaps me out of it. For I can’t escape the truth. I can’t rid myself of the deep chill that seeps into the marrow of my bones.

  Bertrand is dead… echoes in my head.

  I’m struck again by an arrow to my heart when I go to the closed cinema and find Yves a block away painting over the license plate of a vehicle they commandeered for the fighting.

  He tells me Bertrand lost too much blood and the wound became infected.

  He died three days later.

  I’m overcome with grief for a second time. I go numb. My mind, my body can’t absorb it all at once. I will be forever grateful to this giant of a man with the heart of a saint.

  The sad thing is, I never would have known about Bertrand’s death if I hadn’t come here to the closed cinema on a mission of mercy for Emil. I owe the director something for that.

  Yves takes me to a man who knows about my exploits as Fantine. If I need exit papers for a friend, he says, that’s good enough. I secure a false identity card for Emil using the photo from the original one he gave me, then meet him in the bar at the Hôtel Ritz, knowing I’ll never see him again.

  36

  Sylvie

  Paris and the tricolor flower

  Paris

  1944

  I shall never forget the day the Americans liberate Paris.

  To celebrate, Halette and I put red, white, and blue flowers in our hair and make a floral headband for my baby daughter. I grab a pair of old sunglasses to hide behind, then with Halette’s arm linked through mine, the three of us head out, down the inner hall along the Vendôme side to the bottom floor and through the glass entryway. The hotel is filled with a flurry of curious guests, though no Germans (I heard later the Nazi officers were rounded up and kept at the Hôtel Majestic and made to sit on the cold floor scrunched together like trapped rats. I wish I could have been there).

  Throngs of people fill the streets, waving the French tricolors, yelling Vive Paris!

  The three of us wave and wave and wave as tanks and jeeps filled with Allied soldiers drive by, the American army marching along the Champs-Élysées. We didn’t dare leave the safety of the hotel sooner, what with small arms fire all over the city and German snipers on rooftops, some in civilian clothes, making the streets dangerous. Some German convoys trying to escape didn’t make it. Machine gun firing, grenades… everywhere.

  But today the Occupation comes to an end.

  ‘When you’re older, ma petite, I shall tell you about this day and how your papa was a brave Resistance fighter,’ I promise her, ‘and how he and men like him freed France.’

  She coos with delight and then sneezes, but her eyes shine as she looks at me, waving her tiny hands around. She looks so adorable, I can’t help but hug her tight, a strange feeling seeing far beyond today that gives me a chill.

  What’s to become of me now that the Allies are here? Everyone who knew about my work as a member of the Resistance – Jock, Bertrand, Emil – gone.

  No one else knew me as Fantine. I’m me
rely a service number among thousands to the British Foreign Office, known to a Mr Peeps by the number I memorized.

  What if the record is lost?

  Then I have no proof.

  I’ll be labeled as a Nazi collaborator.

  I shudder with an unbelievable chill, my blood running cold. I must find some way to prove my innocence. That I did what I did to free France… not with bullets and bombs, but under deep cover to gather intelligence that ultimately foiled the Nazis search for ultimate power over the French people.

  After taking several deep breaths, I try to find the joy in today with my baby in my arms. I wave at Halette when a handsome American GI grabs her and hoists her up into his Jeep. She’s smiling so big, her dark hair curly and shiny, her eyes grateful she escaped la rafle, the roundup of Jews, though her heart breaks. Still no word about Raoul.

  I move off to the side, duck inside a café away from the crowd, grateful no one recognizes me.

  I smile. How can they?

  Who’d expect to see Sylvie Martone with a baby in her arms?

  ‘Mademoiselle Sylvie… you’re in danger!’ Halette bursts into my hotel room late at night and stops short. Breathing heavy, her long hair loose and hanging limp. Her eyes blazing. ‘You must leave Paris immediately or you’ll be arrested.’

  Hugging my baby closer to my chest, I study her and we both remain silent because there’s a horrifying consequence to what she said if it’s true.

  I lose my child.

  I lose her.

  I lose my life.

  ‘Are you certain my arrest is imminent?’ I beg to know, shifting Madeleine from one hip to another. That once unpredictable, overwhelming fear hits me again, not from the Gestapo, but the French police.

  ‘Yes. All day I’ve walked the boulevards filled with American troops and French protestors wanting to round up every collaborator and tar and feather them. Or worse.’ She sweeps her hair off her face. ‘Men are taken and shot. Women… a more humiliating experience.’