Paris Never Leaves You

by Ellen Feldman

  Charlotte reached out, lifted the price tag that swung from the sleeve of the dress, and read the number again, as if the figure might have changed since the first time she’d looked at it. Forty-nine ninety-five was an unconscionable sum to pay for a dress for a girl Vivi’s age. Even if they had the money, she’d be reluctant. The debate had been raging in her head for some time now. Where did compensating for the hardship and deprivation of Vivi’s early years stop and spoiling her rotten begin? True, the dress was for a special occasion, but Charlotte was ambivalent about that, too.

  The grandmother of a girl in Vivi’s class had become obsessed with her mortality. The woman, who was living out her days in a great heap of limestone on Seventy-Ninth Street, was certain that not only wouldn’t she live to witness her only granddaughter’s wedding, or even her coming-out party, but that it would not be held in the family mansion, which, in view of property and inheritance taxes and the cost of help, would by that time have been sold to a foreign country to serve as a consulate or embassy or turned into the wing of a museum. With those bleak prospects in mind, she’d decided that rather than wait, she’d give her granddaughter a dance while she was still alive and kicking and the impressive building with its soaring ballroom still in the family clutches. Charlotte wasn’t sure she approved of dances for fourteen-year-old girls. The idea carried more than a whiff of the unsavory side of Colette. But she wasn’t foolish or cruel enough to try to keep Vivi from going to one when the rest of her class was.

  Vivi watched her mother studying the price tag.

  “If it’s too much money, I bet Aunt Hannah would give it to me for Christmas. She’s been asking what I want.”

  Charlotte dropped the price tag. “It’s not too much money. And we are not a charity case. You’re right, let’s get carried away.”

  The smile that cracked open Vivi’s face easy as an egg went on and on in the line of mirror-reflected girls. Later, when Charlotte returned the dress, she’d remember that bevy of euphoric Vivis stretching into eternity.

  * * *

  Charlotte never would have been blindsided if she hadn’t still been smarting from that absurd encounter with Hannah’s patient in front of the gilt-framed mirror in the foyer. She should have forgotten the incident by now, but it kept sneaking up on her at odd unexpected moments, like some vulgar practical joker with a bag of nasty tricks up his sleeve. That was the only explanation for what happened in the museum that afternoon, not that anything did happen in the museum that afternoon.

  In earlier days, when Vivi was small and they were new to New York, they’d spent weekends wandering the zoo or the Museum of Natural History hand in hand, wondering at the outrageously expensive and opulent toys at F. A. O. Schwarz, and ending up at Rumpelmayer’s, where Vivi sat with a hot chocolate mustache on her small face and one of the resident teddy bears tucked beside her. But Vivi had outgrown those childish pleasures as well as weekend afternoons with her mother, unless they were shopping for a dress for a dance or some other momentous event. These days she heard the siren call of her peers. The attraction was normal. Vivi’s guilt was not.

  “What are you going to do this afternoon?” she’d ask Charlotte as she put on her coat. Occasionally the question was even more deadly. “Do you want me to hang around and we can do something together?” Even when Charlotte outlined her plans in careful detail—lunch with a colleague from another publishing house, a visit to the Frick to see her old friends the Rembrandts and the Turners—Vivi had a way of hesitating on her way out the door and turning back to look at her mother. Once she’d asked if Charlotte would be okay. That was when Charlotte began leaving the apartment when her daughter did. Striding away from Vivi on the street was easier on Vivi.

  That afternoon, they walked down Park Avenue to the building on the corner of Eighty-Eighth Street where Alice and her family lived. The compromise solution to the cheating incident had worked: Alice had been deterred from a life of crime, and she and Vivi were still best friends. Standing on the street under the dark green awning, Charlotte kissed her daughter quickly, told her to have a good time at the movies, and started off. Then she turned back.

  “I forgot to ask what you’re going to see.”

  “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”

  “Have fun,” Charlotte said again, and this time she kept going.

  She told herself not to be ridiculous. It was only the title of a movie. Not even the real title. The F. Scott Fitzgerald story the film was based on was called “Babylon Revisited.” Nonetheless, Vivi’s words followed her down Park Avenue and over to Fifth and all through MoMA until finally she gave up trying to see the art and sat on a bench in one of the galleries. The paintings and sculptures and other museumgoers fell away as everything had in the foyer that day, and she was back there.

  * * *

  The bell above the door to the shop jingles, and she looks up, but she can see nothing. The awning over the window is useless at this time of year. It’s the end of June, and the sun refuses to set. It slants into the shop, blinding her and turning him into a silhouette. She cannot see his face or what he is wearing. He is merely a black outline carved from the brilliance of the evening. But the two young students who are browsing must be able to make him out against the glare, because they move toward the door, each slinking around either side of him, and slip out of the shop into the dazzling setting sun.

  Bon soir. The words are almost out of her mouth when he takes another step toward her, and she recognizes the uniform. For more than a year now, they have been marching around the city, swaggering up and down boulevards, scattering people in their wake, shouldering their way into restaurants and cinemas and shops, buying up everything in sight. She cannot keep him out. But she does not have to welcome him. She does not have to speak to him at all. She swallows the greeting and goes back to the book she is reading, though she knows she will not be able to concentrate, not with him in the shop. In the storeroom in back, Vivi whimpers in uneasy sleep.

  He asks in fluent but accented French if she minds if he browses. She keeps her head down, her eyes focused on the unintelligible words, and nods her head in a noncommittal way. He begins wandering around the store, taking books off the tables and down from the shelves, leafing through them, putting them back. She keeps track of him out of the corner of her eye. He is returning the books where they belong. He is one of the correct ones.

  He keeps browsing. She keeps pretending to read. Her silence apparently doesn’t bother him. Why should it? He’s the conqueror, the occupier, the one who has nothing to fear. But she feels the quiet as a palpable presence, almost as loud as the fretting that is mounting in the back room. She stands and starts toward the sound. She doesn’t have to worry about keeping an eye on him. Conquerors don’t steal, they appropriate. Apartments, factories, haute couture salons, publishing houses. No, they didn’t have to appropriate the publishing houses. Most of the publishers were eager to cooperate. How else could they get their hands on the necessary paper and turn a profit? And they are turning a profit. Book publishing came to a halt during the first months of the Occupation, then roared back to life, albeit an insipid spineless version of it. Henri Filipacchi at Hachette drew up a list of books to be banned. Many of his colleagues contributed to it. Bernard Grasset of Editions Grasset sent out a letter to his fellow publishers advising them to censor themselves, thereby sparing the German Propaganda Office the trouble. Most of them went along with the unholy suggestion, though some have begun to play a dangerous double game. Gaston Gallimard dines with Propaganda Office officials—the shortage of paper again—while turning a blind eye to the communists who put out their underground publication from his firm’s offices. It’s lucky her father has fled. He would not countenance a double game. He would go before a firing squad, or under the guillotine, which the Germans are using again in public executions at La Santé Prison on the rue de la Santé in Montparnasse, before he’d sell his beloved Éditions Aumont, which was his soul, to the devil. I
nstead, he’d closed it down. That was how Charlotte, who’d begun working there after university, had ended up running the bookstore on rue Toullier, that and the fact that her father’s old friend Étienne de la Bruyère, the owner of Librairie la Bruyère, had been called up by the military, captured by the Germans, and sent into forced labor. As a child, she’d spent blissful hours in the shop, curled up in one of the vaulted corner alcoves with all the books she could ever want while her father and Monsieur de la Bruyère discussed what her father was publishing, and Monsieur de la Bruyère was selling, and people were buying. The shop, like all of Paris, has lost some of its luster since the Germans marched in. The beautiful herringbone patterned floor is scuffed. There is no floor polish available in Occupied Paris. At least, none is available to anyone except the Occupiers and their collaborators. The old India rugs are showing wear. But the carved art deco mahogany panels still frame the sections of shelves, and she still has, if not all the books she could ever want, thanks to Nazi censorship, then more than she will ever be able to read. The point is, the browsing officer can take anything he wants, and he knows it.

  She steps into the back room, lifts Vivi out of the crate she has lined with a quilt, and begins to jiggle her against her shoulder, trying to fool her out of her hunger pains. Simone has been gone for more than an hour. The queues often go on for longer. She and Simone take turns, one queueing for whatever is meagerly available that day, the other minding the store. Simone’s daughter has a J1 card that entitles children between the ages of three and six to extra rations. Charlotte has a card that permits nursing mothers, or those who claim to be still nursing—even the most efficient German does not try to determine if a woman’s milk has dried up—to go to the head of the queue. Her card is more valuable than Simone’s. Extra allocations mean nothing, when there is nothing left to allocate. A week earlier, two thousand people queued for three hundred portions of rabbit, or so the word that went down the line said. The queues are rumor mills. It’s hard to believe what people say, impossible not to.

  She returns to the front of the store, still jiggling a crying Vivi against her shoulder. He is standing, with a book in one hand, beside the mahogany counter where the cash register sits. As she goes behind the register, she keeps her head down, refusing to look at him. His free hand comes into her line of vision. His fingers are long and slender. She wonders, irrelevantly, if he plays the piano. Germany wasn’t always like this. It was the land of Bach and Beethoven and Wagner, people told one another in an attempt to console themselves when the troops first marched in. But Wagner played at full volume, it turns out, is good for drowning out the cries of the tortured, or so rumors go. These days the city runs on rumors, as it used to on petrol when there were still automobiles. The hand seems to be moving toward Vivi, as if to soothe her. Charlotte stops herself from taking a step back, but she cannot help stiffening. The hand withdraws. Perhaps he is not insensitive. Perhaps he has intuited how repugnant she would find his laying an Aryan finger, even a long graceful Aryan finger, on her child. The hand returns into her line of vision. Now it is holding francs. Still refusing to look at him, she takes the bills, puts them in the cash register, counts out change, starts to hand it to him. Only then does she notice the title and author above the price on the volume he is holding. She had been too scared to before. It is Stefan Zweig’s book with a section on Freud. It is on the so-called Otto list of banned books. Works by or about Jews are forbidden, and this is both. They were supposed to turn it in to be sent to the vast warehouse where outlawed books are pulped or left to molder, but Simone took the copies they had in stock and hid them in the storeroom. Many booksellers are selling banned books under the counter, partly in defiance, partly for profit. Only this purchase is not under the counter. Simone either missed the book or left it on the shelf intentionally, another of her futile dangerous gestures. Charlotte loves Simone, like a sister they always say, but sometimes she could kill her. She supposes that’s sisterly, too.

  Her hand is still hovering near his with the change. Does she hand it over and let him walk out of the store with the book? She could be arrested for less. Does she tell him it’s a mistake, that they have turned in the other copies, that they must have missed this one in their eagerness to comply? She cannot sell it to him, to anyone, she will insist. It is against the law. The explanation sickens her, but she knows she will make it to save her skin, hers and Vivi’s.

  She looks up and, frightened as she is, she almost has to laugh. The joke about Hitler, the epitome of blond, blue-eyed, strong-jawed Aryanism, is standing in front of her in the flesh. This Wehrmacht officer has dark hair, black eyes set deep behind rimless glasses, and the long ascetic face of a saint. While she is staring at him, he takes the change from her hand, executes a slight bow, and starts toward the door with the contraband book. As she watches him go, she notices that he slips the volume into his tunic before he steps into the street. So he knows it’s banned.

  A moment later, the two students who had fled at the sight of him return, and shortly after that the bell jingles again, and Monsieur Grassin, another friend of her father’s, comes through the door. Grassin, an ethnographer at the Palais de Chaillot, visits the shop periodically. He has promised her father to look after her as best he can. Unfortunately, he is not up to the task. A member of the Resistance, or so she suspects, he sleeps in a different place every night or two. He is not easy to find, but he has told her that if she ever needs his help, she is to put his book, Seeing and Writing Culture, in the window as a sign. “But be careful of the stampede,” he’d joked at the time. “You know how popular the subject is.”

  “I was waiting for the boche to leave,” he tells her now, then asks after her and Vivi. He doesn’t stay long, but she knows that, despite the nonfunctioning postal system, he will get word to her father that she and Vivi are, if not safe, then surviving.

  * * *

  She loses sleep over the Zweig book with the section on Freud. She and Simone both do. But no military car pulls up in front of the store, no Germans come thundering in, not even a gendarme appears. The officer, however, returns. She is in the store alone again. He asks if he may browse again. She remains silent again. Why doesn’t he frequent the stalls along the Seine? The quays are crowded with Germans trying, unsuccessfully, to saunter like Parisians, hoping to blunt their barbarism with an infusion of purloined French culture and style. Why doesn’t he take his business to the Rive-Gauche, a big slick bookstore run by a collaborationist, backed by the Occupation authorities, and stocked with German propaganda and approved French trash? But he has developed a liking for the shop. He comes in the following week and the one after that. Sometimes she is sitting behind the cash register, sometimes Simone is, sometimes they’re both there. Books and money pass between one or the other of them and the officer, but few words. Occasionally he will inquire about a book. One day he asks for Moby-Dick. Charlotte stiffens. Melville is on the Otto list. Is he trying to trap her? She explains she is forbidden to stock the book. The next time he asks for a volume of short stories by Thomas Mann, who has also been banned. When she tells him that, too, is forbidden, he buys a volume of Proust, who, strangely enough in view of his Jewish ancestry, is not. The week after that he purchases a copy of Being and Time by Heidegger. Perhaps he is not a spy, merely a man with eclectic interests.

  “The boche has good taste,” Simone says after another of his visits. “That’s one more thing I hate about him and all the rest of them with literary pretensions.”

  Charlotte knows she is thinking of the high-ranking official who threatened to close down Shakespeare & Company and confiscate all its stock after Sylvia Beach refused to sell him her last copy, or so she said, of Finnegans Wake. As soon as he left the shop, Sylvia sent out the call to friends and colleagues. Within two hours, they had emptied the store of all the books and even the shelves and electrical fixtures. By the time the official arrived with his men to carry out his threat, Shakespeare & Company had c
eased to exist, thanks to a house painter who had obliterated the name on the front of 12 rue de l’Odéon. They never did find the shop, though they arrested Sylvia and put her in an internment camp. She was released after six months, and gossip has it that she’s in hiding here in Paris. Charlotte could swear she saw her one evening just before curfew standing in the shadows on the rue de l’Odéon, staring at number 12. She didn’t approach her.

  Sylvia should have gone into hiding in the south after the incident, as Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas did, not that they’re actually in hiding. From what Charlotte has heard, they’re living safely and well at their house in the Bugey under the protection of Gertrude’s old friend Bernard Faÿ, a notorious anti-Semite who was appointed director of the Bibliotheque Nationale after a Jew was fired from the position. Stein, a Jew, is another example of literary figures playing both sides of the game. Before the war she told an American newspaper that Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, but her admiration didn’t stop the censors from putting her books on the Otto list. Charlotte’s father had broken with Stein over the Hitler remark, as well as her support for Franco, though the latter hadn’t seemed to bother Stein’s friend Picasso, who plays perhaps the most dangerous double game of all. He gives money to the Resistance and has been known to harbor fugitives (or so people say; no one knows for sure, and most people don’t want to; the less you know, the safer you are), but he entertains German visitors in his studio, while instructing Françoise Gilot to follow them around to make sure they don’t plant anything. Nonetheless, artists have an easier time under the Nazi boot than writers, whose messages are more explicit.

  This German officer, however, seems less dangerous. He is unfailingly polite. He tries to fit in, as much as a man in that hated gray-green uniform can fit in. He is almost successful. The other customers begin to grow accustomed to him. They no longer put down the books they’re looking at and drift out of the store when he arrives. Even the elderly teacher who has been dismissed from the Lycée Condorcet for being Jewish and frequently comes to the shop to sit in the worn leather chair in a nook and read the volumes he can no longer afford to buy ignores him, but then these days the professor seems to notice less and less. He lives in a world created by the words on the page.