He still didn’t give a damn. ‘Their names?’
‘Dr. André de Verville and his wife, Simone.’ He got the address, too. This he carefully wrote down in a small notebook before closing up my papers and handing them back. He knew I’d said ‘people’ instead of ‘friends.’ He thought Jean-Guy might be Jewish-sometimes it was hard to tell. Marie was far more Aryan, and he lay the tip of a forefinger under her chin and asked, ‘Mein Kind, what’s really in those baskets?’
‘Bitte, Herr General, my daughter only knows a few words of Deutsch.’
‘Guns and bombs,’ said Marie en français. ‘That’s why I’ve brought my paints and paper.’
I stammered something and tried to pass it off with a grin, but he slapped her face and shrieked: ‘I could have you shot for that!’
The Gare de Lyon was crowded. Flics in blue capes with their leaded hems seemed everywhere, so, too, those in plain clothes, but somehow we got through, and soon the station was behind us.
‘Will we see Papa?’ asked Jean-Guy.
‘Of course. As soon as we get to Simone’s I’ll call him to tell him we’re here.’
‘Are you really pregnant, maman?’
It was Marie who asked and I couldn’t lie to her. ‘Oui. Is it such a bad thing, Jean-Guy?’
‘Only if you don’t know who the father is.’
‘Hey listen you, it’s Tommy’s, and you’d better not say anything about it for all our sakes.’
Marie looked up at me. There was such innocence in her eyes. ‘Will Dr. André help you to get rid of it?’
I shook my head, and she heaved a contented sigh and locked her arms more firmly about the handle of the basket. ‘Then I will help you and we’ll have a baby brother for Jean-Guy and me to play with.’
Paris in the late autumn of 1942 was, if anything, shabbier than before. Oh, for sure, everything was wide open for the Nazis and those that were with them, but there were the beginnings of doubt even amongst the most ardent of collaborators. On 8 November, the Allies had landed en masse in Algeria and Morocco, on the 11th, the Wehrmacht, in retaliation, had ended the existence of the zone libre by taking over the whole of France, but were being held up at Stalingrad. If the winter should be particularly harsh, they might be stopped, even turned back, and the Allies were determined. Everyone knew there would be an invasion, but when?
Sometimes we’d hear the RAF going over to bomb targets deep in the Reich, or they’d come closer to home to hit the Renault Works in Boulogne-Billancourt, a suburb of Paris. I remember being with André and Simone in that flat of theirs and watching. I remember so many things but what was it about the rue Mouffetard that made me so edgy? I’d left the children and the things I’d brought with Simone. Marcel was to pick up the Nobel 808 and the guns later when he came for me. Normally, there was a street market every Sunday morning, and there was one that day, but it didn’t seem right. Lots of people milling about, not a lot for sale, but it was as if everyone in that street sensed that something terrible was going to happen.
The street climbed steeply. It was narrow, paved with blocks of stone, and you got that lovely closed-in feeling of a village and its market. The grey and pale-green of slate and copper roofs were often four or five storeys up to attic garrets and but a jumble, since some of the houses were very old. Innumerable chimney pots reached for the sky, the windows shuttered or open, but no balconies. Shops lined the street. Basically, it was a nation of small shopkeepers, but many were down on their luck.
I hurried along but kept asking myself what could be wrong? Me, I felt it, you understand, and at a point, one hundred metres from the courtyard that led to my sister’s flat, I foolishly broke into a run, someone immediately yelling, ‘Halt, verfluchte Französin!’ as another shouts, ‘Hände hoch!’
I tripped, fell, banged my knees, and tore my only pair of stockings, but found that the courtyard door was locked. I shouted at it, nearly breaking my fists while down the street, people turned to watch. ‘JANINE, LET ME IN!’
Throwing a shoulder against that door, I yelled for her again. Suddenly, it was flung open, and as some boys leaped aside, I ran the length of that courtyard and darted into the open doorway. The concierge looked out from her loge and started to object, but the Himalayas of those stairs were almost more than I can manage. One flight, two flights, round and round, me knowing they were after me now, that they wouldn’t stop until they had me, and never mind the child that was inside me. I had to get to Nini before they did, but there was no one in her room, and my heart was hammering so hard it was going to burst.
The washroom was at the far end of the corridor, and I made a bolt for it, had to hide, but knew it was of no use, for the mirror was still there on that wall in its cheap frame, cracked like all such mirrors, and I saw myself breathlessly saying, ‘Nini … chérie, it’s finished for us!’
That door opened. ‘Lily, what’s the matter?’
‘The street. The Boche. There were none of them until I began to run.’
There, I’ve confessed that, too. I broke. I panicked.
She grabbed me by the hand, and we raced back to that room of hers. Parting the cheap lace curtains, she glanced down at the street and said only, ‘We’ll have to go over the top.’
‘I can’t, Nini! I’m five-and-a-half months.’
‘Idiote!’
A whistle shrilled, the first of several, but all too soon there was the sound of motorcycles and the squeal of brakes, the cries of ‘Raus! Raus!’ the hammering of hobnailed boots and bashing of rifle butts.
Dragging a small suitcase from under the bed, she flung a few things into it, and as we reached the head of the stairs and I looked down, that spiral came rushing up at me. ‘Go down,’ she said.
‘Nini, I can’t!’
‘Carry your coat and hide that hat. Act naturally. Bluff it!’
Give her time to get away.
Two German corporals were going from door to door, bashing them in and yelling for everyone to get out, but they were still on the first floor, and some of the tenants were leaning over the railing like I was, wondering what to do. But the child gave a lurch, a tear that caused me to grip my middle and wonder if the baby had dropped. ‘Nini … Nini, I love you. Bonne chance.’
‘The Jardin du Luxembourg, but watch your back,’ she said as we briefly embraced. ‘I’ll see you later.’
I started down. For me, it was the most difficult thing I’d ever had to do. Schiller and Dupuis would be waiting for me, one at each end of the street. My coat was over an arm, my hat hidden. When I reached a woman with two small children hurrying out of a fourth-floor flat, I heard one of them asking where they were going, and I took that little girl’s hand in mine, smiled at the mother and said, ‘To see the puppets, n’est-ce pas?’ It was a last desperate gamble, a prayer.
The street had been cordoned off, and there was a wall of German soldiers at either end of the sector they’d chosen for the house-to-house, and as we walked towards the nearest, we did so uphill, until a Feldwebel’s unfeeling eyes searched mine and I heard myself asking, as if of the weather, ‘What’s the trouble, Officer?’ and I couldn’t understand the person who had said that. I couldn’t! It was like I was two entirely different people.
He shook his head, tore the papers from my hand, looked at the two children, at their mother, and thrust my papers back at me.
I thought I was going to have the baby right there, but they were looking for someone else.
It took me a good hour or more to shake those who were tailing me and get to the Jardin du Luxembourg. I remember that the ribbon of the Légion d’honneur was pinned to the old man’s blazer and that he rented toy sailing boats with a defiance that was admirable, for he refused all German requests. Instead, children vied with their parents for them as the statues of the queens of France looked down from their terraced heights.