by J. R. Lonie
‘Helmets float,’ he explained.
They set off and soon began to go up a rise. A dog barked not far away as it sensed the arrival of strangers. They came to the first house on the left, set back from the roadway behind a small garden.
A VILLAGE, UNOCCUPIED SIDE OF THE RIVER ALLIER, LOIRE, VICHY FRANCE
Around 2am, Wednesday, 10th December 1941
‘At last,’ Eleanor muttered impatiently. She went to the door. Her knocking seemed to echo through the village. If that didn’t waken their contact, she thought, it would certainly waken the dead in the church graveyard. The door opened, and framed by the entrance was a woman, just as Silvan had promised. She was young, with pretty bobbed hair. Eleanor noticed that the smile she flashed was directed not at her but at Stalin.
‘Is this the boulangerie?’ Eleanor asked, as instructed. The young woman said no, but she had nice sweet apples.
‘You are the first tonight,’ the young woman added. Given what had befallen them, this surprised Eleanor, and in the next moment worried her. Had the Germans caught the others? ‘It’s dark,’ said the young woman. ‘The Boches are everywhere on the other side, so they must wait until they’re gone.’
‘We need to get our papers,’ said Stalin to Eleanor, who in turn asked the young woman.
‘Tomorrow,’ said the young woman. That much he understood.
‘We need to get them now,’ he pressed, seemingly immune to the young woman’s charms.
‘They are not ready,’ she replied in broken and heavily accented English.
‘Where are we to spend the rest of the night?’ Eleanor asked.
‘In the barn behind the blacksmith,’ she explained. Eleanor wasn’t having any of that. She said she would pay to sleep in a bed if one was available. Without a moment’s reflection, the young woman agreed and mentioned a price, which Eleanor was happy to pay. She’d have paid a king’s ransom if asked, and she handed over the money.
‘We cannot stay,’ said Stalin. ‘We must get away.’
‘Go then,’ said Eleanor. ‘I’m staying.’ How could the Germans possibly find them? They didn’t even know what had happened. Anyway, she didn’t care if the Gestapo burst in on her, she had to get herself dry; she couldn’t continue right now, murders or no murders. Where on earth would they go? She had no energy left to argue with him.
The young woman saw the little cat poke its head out of Stalin’s coat. She lost any interest in showing Eleanor to her room.
‘Oh,’ she said, charmed, and if being kind to his cat was the way to make Stalin into a human being, it worked. She offered milk, which he accepted with ‘Merci, merci’ and, Eleanor noticed, with the nearest she had seen to a smile.
The young woman ushered them both inside, shut the door and quickly lit a small lamp that gave off enough light to show the way.
‘Toilet,’ said Stalin but he meant for the cat. How ridiculously fastidious, Eleanor thought. Had it whispered to him? ‘Of course,’ said the young woman. She handed the lamp to Eleanor and bade her go up the stairs to the room on the left at the top while she attended to the cat.
‘I too need to use the toilet,’ Eleanor growled. Be damned if she was going to play second fiddle to a cat or to the flirting of the young. The young woman pointed absently to a door at the far end of the house and guided Stalin, with cat, outside. Eleanor was furious. Where he was going to sleep, she did not care.
The room upstairs was tiny, the ceiling steeply slanted; you could stand only in the middle. Two narrow beds were against opposite walls, separated by a single bedside table at one end; a narrow wardrobe partly blocked the door at the other. Eleanor quickly took off her clothes, hung the wet things to dry in the wardrobe, found clean underwear and, after sprinkling the bed with some of her perfume, slipped under the heavy blanket. It might have been rough, but dear God, it was warm and she was alone at last. Except she became acutely conscious of her unwashed face, which felt as if it were smeared in pig fat with a top layer of grit. Sleep was almost impossible but she was damned if she was going to ask that minx where the bathroom was. Yes, she knew she was cutting off her nose to spite her unwashed face, but it was enjoyable in the perverse mood she was in. She got up, retrieved Al’s bottle of cognac and true to her perversity, Finnegans Wake, then crawled back into bed. She took a generous slug of the cognac, opened the book and tried unsuccessfully to find where she’d left off. It didn’t seem to matter.
The door opened. Stalin entered, followed by the young woman. ‘You are comfortable?’ she asked pleasantly.
‘Yes,’ said Eleanor. ‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Two beds,’ replied the young woman as if it was obvious, ‘two people.’
‘In separate rooms,’ Eleanor insisted as she realised she had paid for him as well.
‘There is no separate room’ was the reply.
What about yours? Eleanor was about to suggest, an agreeable solution given the way the young woman had taken such a shine to Stalin. Or was it just the cat? In any case, he was inside now.
‘Do not open the curtains or the window,’ the young woman instructed. She would wake them in time in the morning, she said, closed the door and left.
Stalin said nothing to her. With no by your leave or may I, he sat on the other bed, dropped his rucksack, took off his boots and his socks, which Eleanor noticed were quite new and of good quality. Stolen, she had already concluded. He put the cat on the bed as he removed his outer garments.
He was here only because he couldn’t think of an alternative. At least this was the Vichy side, though that made him feel only marginally less insecure. The Nazis would be searching for their soldiers by now. How long before someone found them? Who might find them? These sorts of killings made the Wehrmacht insane with fury, and he didn’t trust any frontier created by them. He’d been worried because the bodies had floated off in the wrong direction, back up into Occupied France, not down into Vichy as he had expected. He was no good at north and south, and Miss Rich American had already caught him out. She was glaring at him, too lousy to offer him a cigarette. Sure, he’d taken – what was it, two, three lousy German army ration cigarettes? Big deal. Then he saw the open cognac on the bedside table. He had a good mind just to help himself.
She read his thoughts and handed him the bottle, and, as an afterthought, her cigarettes.
‘I’m Eleanor,’ she said. ‘At least we should know each other’s name.’
He took a draught of the cognac and handed it back. ‘You know my name,’ he replied and lit one of her cigarettes.
‘Your real name,’ she said.
‘There is no point,’ he said. After he finished the cigarette, he slipped under the blanket and drew in his little cat so it was warm and safe.
He can please himself, she thought. She’d tried. When next she looked, the little cat was sitting outside the cover cleaning itself. Stalin was either asleep or feigning sleep. At least the cat loved him, she conceded, and he loved it. She noticed something around his neck, a locket of plain silver on a cheap silver chain. What was in it? A hair from the bald head of Lenin? Given what had happened earlier, she now considered it a travesty to read the meandering fantasies of James Joyce. The cognac wasn’t working. She’d be sick if she drank much more. Her heart felt empty. She was angry. Hettie’s suicide weighed on her. She reached for her rucksack and drew out her King James and went to the Psalms, to the 23rd. ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . .’ As she read, she began to feel some comfort; she no longer felt alone.
A VILLAGE, UNOCCUPIED SIDE OF THE RIVER ALLIER, LOIRE, VICHY FRANCE
5am, Wednesday, 10th December 1941
On waking, Eleanor noticed her companion sleeping as peacefully as his cat. He woke with a start and saw her staring resentfully at him.
‘You’re just a boy,’ she said, not meant as a compliment.
‘I was never a boy,’ he replied. ‘What is the time?’ He didn’t wait
for an answer, reached for her wristwatch on the bedside table to see for himself. ‘We must leave.’ He lifted the cat, got up and started to put on his clothes. ‘My name is Henk,’ he said.
‘That’s an improvement on Stalin,’ she replied.
He nodded as he sat to do up his boots. He indicated Finnegans Wake sitting on the bedside table.
‘Why do the Nazis want this book?’ he asked.
‘How do you know that?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘I thought you didn’t understand French.’
‘Your friend Al speaks it in English,’ he said. She was still suspicious.
‘Greed,’ she replied. ‘It’s a rare first edition with an extremely fine provenance. The author will be rolling in his grave.’
‘You are an intellectual,’ he sneered.
Eleanor smiled at his rush to judgment on such thin evidence. ‘That’s not what my fellow writers say about me and they’re right. I don’t understand a word of it.’
‘Why do you carry it?’ he demanded.
‘You sound like a certain Boche major of my unwilling acquaintance,’ she replied coolly. Disappointingly, he did not bite.
‘I’m American,’ she said. ‘I’m duty-bound to defend Mr Joyce’s right to scribble gibberish and get away with it, not to mention to stop it from falling into the hands of a voracious Nazi.’
Her attempt at levity got nowhere. He picked up her Bible. She snatched it back.
‘You believe in Stalin,’ she snapped. ‘That’s what I believe in.’
He shook his head. ‘You are a fool,’ he said.
‘An intellectual and a fool as well!’ Eleanor replied. ‘My, what a poor wretch.’
She wasn’t going to engage with him any longer, a waste of time and breath. She mightn’t be a good Christian but when she read the Gospels, she knew the writers had been trying to make sense of what they had seen and experienced, something mysterious and life changing. The stories were too vivid for fiction – their differences and contradictions were proof of that. She had known it so as a child, the alpha and omega of her faith, her present distemper notwithstanding. Private, not for the likes of him to trample over with his ignorance, disdain and contempt. He was just like the literary raptors with their leftist certainties and moral vanity. But what did the Bible say about loving thy neighbour if he was a murderer? Why on earth was she caught up with such a pest? She was mindful of the irony of this Henk in her life. He was as far as could be from Yann, the young killer who captures the heart of her alter ego Selina in The American Woman. The contrast between art and life couldn’t have been greater.
She got up and felt her clothes. They were still damp. She was desperate for the bathroom. Her hair was a mess, her face a catastrophe.
The sharp rap on the door startled them. The young woman pushed in, wide-eyed and nervous.
‘You must leave now,’ she said. ‘There is trouble.’
Both knew much more about the trouble than did the young woman. Eleanor only had time to put back on her damp clothes. The young woman hurried them down the stairs and out through a back gate to a path, then led them to the barn at the back of the blacksmith’s. As they hurried away through the dark, Eleanor took out her cognac, drank a generous drop to fortify herself and handed it to Henk, who did the same. Without a hint of thanks, she noted.
The blacksmith’s forge was already firing up. They could hear the curses of the blacksmith and the bellows he was trying to coax into action – to him it was a day like yesterday, the day before, any day. The young woman tapped on the door and it opened to Al, who was sober and sour for it. He beckoned them in and shut the door behind them.
‘What happened to you?’ he demanded.
‘The mist was so thick,’ Eleanor answered as lightly as she could, ‘but we made it across safely.’ She assumed he knew where they’d stayed the night.
‘You never saw nothing? No Boches?’
‘Nothing,’ Eleanor replied, leaving it at that. She could see plainly enough that Al had wind of what happened. Enquiry might lead to complications. She didn’t think Al would be best pleased to hear they were the cause.
‘Your papers,’ said Al, handing them over. Eleanor glanced at hers.
‘Madame Helene Rouget?’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought I was to be the widow de Lisle.’
‘You are still the widow,’ explained Al, ‘but because of your accent, you are the mama born in America. He is your French son, Anton. You are from Toulouse. Neat, huh?’ Explaining his ingenuity was improving his mood. ‘You’re going to Toulouse, kid,’ he said to Henk.
‘He barely speaks a word of French,’ Eleanor said.
‘Shit,’ said Al in French. This was news. ‘But you do,’ he said, as if this fixed everything. ‘Don’t forget the accent. Look,’ he added, pointing proudly to her new identity, ‘born in Hollywood, Calif.’
‘Toulouse?’ Henk said. ‘No. I pay to go to Pau. Not Toulouse. Pau. I pay for that.’
‘Yeah, Mac, we heard you,’ Al said in his faux gangster English.
Eleanor switched to French. ‘I don’t need these,’ she said. ‘America’s not at war with France. I have my American passport; I can make my own way now.’
‘You’re in the middle of nowhere, babe,’ said Al. ‘Help the yid out till Lyon, then you can be whoever you want to be.’
What does it matter? she said to herself, resigned. Could things get any worse? She consented she owed her present freedom to him. But Pau?
‘Are you insane?’ she said to Henk. ‘You can’t cross into Spain over the Pyrénées. It’s coming winter, unless you haven’t noticed.’
‘I have paid for a passage to Spain through Pau,’ he replied stubbornly.
‘More fool you,’ she muttered. She thought she’d erased the wretched place from her memory but there it was, like a scab waiting to be picked.
Al returned. ‘Let’s move out,’ he said in French, then to Eleanor in his Hollywood best, ‘The Indians are on the warpath, babe. Two of their braves was scalped last night.’
Eleanor feared she was like General Custer at the wrong end of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Outside, the rest of the party were boarding a small truck. Everyone else had made it across without incident. Henk clambered in. Al helped Eleanor up, whacked the back of the truck and scrambled himself in as the motor revved and they were away.
ORTSKOMMANDANTUR 891, NEVERS, BURGUNDY, GERMAN-OCCUPIED FRANCE
5.15am, Wednesday, 10th December 1941
Missing? Two? How?
Through the early-morning hours, each level of the German army responded in exactly the same way as they reported higher up the chain of command. The details did not change.
Two men, a private and a one-striper, were in a ten-man section patrolling the German-occupied side along a stretch of the Allier River in Section A. The mist was thick, so the section broke into pairs for the rest of the patrol, agreeing to regroup at a point two kilometres downstream. When they did, Private Schelling and Lance Corporal Jentsch, eighteen and twenty-one respectively, were missing. The section waited fifteen minutes beyond the appointed time of 0130 and radioed the lieutenant, who brought up the rest of the platoon, and they searched in a line upriver for five kilometres. This had taken them to the beginning of Section B, by which time it was after four am. In the process, they captured three Jews and apprehended six French citizens who were trying to cross the river into the Zone Süd, the South Zone, as they called the unoccupied part of France. There was neither sign of their two missing comrades nor any indication that they might have come to grief. It was as if they’d been lifted off the earth without a trace.
The theory was they had encountered escapees or those who were helping them and had been either murdered or captured. Whatever the case, this was intolerable. Now a more complete search was to start using army dogs. The French police on both sides of the demarcation line had been ordered to help, although it was clear that the Vichy police would help in their own good time. Posters were being pr
epared with photographs of the two soldiers and a reward had been offered for information. The French as well as the Jews taken last night were being held as hostages.
The Geheime Feldpolizei, the army’s secret field police, were being brought in as a matter of urgency, but no Gestapo – not yet, if anyone could help it, unless the GFP got nowhere.
BALARD SHOOTING RANGE FORT MONT VALÉRIEN, SURESNES
Around 7am, Wednesday, 10th December 1941
The young man yelled ‘Vive la liberté’ but didn’t get past the ‘vive’. The shots cut short his cry as they cut short his life. The lieutenant of the squad went quickly to confirm the prisoner was dead. Then he marched up and saluted Geheime Feldpolizei Kommissar Anton Bauer, who was standing at the back. Bauer followed him to the young man’s body, sagging forward from the wooden post to which he had been bound.
‘That’s him,’ muttered Bauer, who had tracked him down and arrested him. There was no doubt, but they had to stick to the legalities. The young man’s age on the death certificate was wrong. Eighteen years old?
‘That’s not right,’ he said to the lieutenant. ‘He was twenty-four.’
The form, however, was correct. He was just a kid, bravura and all.
Stupid, stupid, Bauer said to himself. These kids, they’re easily led. He’d like to get his hands on the ones who had poisoned this one’s mind to shoot a German officer in the back. And had given him the gun. They’ll die in their own beds at ninety, while this boy was for the worms before he’d had a chance to feel a girl’s caress. The old copper in Bauer could still be incensed. He hated those old lags who corrupted the young into crime. He took no pleasure in executions except when it was one of those grey-bearded devils. He’d pull the lever himself to drop one of them to the bottom of the rope. Never was allowed to, wasn’t his job. His job was to nail them. That at least was a satisfaction. Not like this, though. He countersigned the death certificate and left.