The Woman From Saint Germain

by J. R. Lonie

  The guard stood silent, pensive. He wasn’t much mollified by the apology or explanation. He’d stand up to them if it was just him, but his little boy?

  He told Bauer he hadn’t seen the young man, only the woman. The young man was her son; he’d been down by the river filling their canteens. She was a lady; you could tell by the way she spoke, even though her clothes were dirty from the travel.

  ‘No accent?’ Bauer asked. ‘Possibly American?’

  ‘No,’ replied the guard. ‘She was from Paris and classy. She said her son was in trouble with your lot and they had to leave in a hurry. I’d asked her why they hadn’t taken the train once they’d crossed the demarcation line.’ He told Bauer what she looked like, but his description added little to the image Bauer had already created in his mind. ‘Oh yes,’ the guard added, ‘she’s taller than average.’

  Bauer had already worked that out from the contents of the valise. Maybe they were mother and son after all, he mused. He pondered having the guard sit with a sketch artist, so he could get a drawing distributed, but there was no time. He didn’t feel the need to speak to the engineer, who, the guard explained, hadn’t seen the woman.

  He went to his car and was impressed that the promised radio communication direct to Inspector St Jean really worked. He made do with a description – ‘middle-aged woman, tall, brown hair and eyes, bourgeois, French-speaking, though possibly American, without a valise, although possibly with a rucksack’ – to be sent to all hotels as soon as possible. St Jean agreed, but how actively he would execute the request Bauer could only hope.

  He couldn’t use emotional blackmail anymore. He had learnt that back in Nevers; even the Wehrmacht had seen no purpose in shooting the French hostages, and they had been quietly released. None of the foreign Jews had been shot, either. The army was apparently deep in a tussle with the SS over its powers in France, so the Jews were to be packed off to a camp in Compiègne while who could shoot whom, where and when was sorted out.

  ‘You better catch the bastard who did this,’ the Kommandant in Nevers had informed him by telegram, ‘or you can go back home to Frankfurt and chase rats.’

  He’d do anything to avoid that; being in the army was the only way he could keep in touch with his boys and abreast of what they were facing. Now that Georg was missing, it was even more vital.

  Just then, the train from Toulouse staggered in under the awning over the passenger platform. While waiting for Kopitcke to return, Bauer joined the gendarmes, who, with their dogs, were stopping every young male.

  BOULEVARD DES PYRÉNÉES, PAU

  Around 4pm, Friday, 12th December 1941

  ‘Where is Boulevard des Pyrénées?’ Henk asked, once they’d reached the city.

  ‘You’re standing on it,’ Eleanor replied. ‘Why?’

  ‘That is all I know about Pau,’ he said.

  ‘That’s all one needs to know,’ she muttered. What a cruel joke life was playing on her, she thought, acutely aware of her present emotional turmoil. She’d been in an emotional turmoil the last time she’d been here.

  Then her blood froze. There, flapping in the breeze above the Hôtel de France, opposite the funicular station, was the invader’s red flag with its crooked cross.

  ‘What are they doing here?’ she snapped. Closer, she saw the sign. German Armistice Commission. ‘Did you know the Nazis were here?’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ he said, moving away quickly. ‘How do I know this?’ he snapped back at her once they had retreated along the boulevard.

  At least she couldn’t see any of their uniforms about on foot, nor a bulging neck under a fedora. But they were here. ‘What a stupid, stupid place to come to,’ she muttered.

  The hotels and the cafés were still here, she noted, now shabby and run-down. She told him she’d leave him in one of them while she found somewhere to stay. All were crowded, which surprised her, although instead of the wealthy English and Germans, whose outlandish fashions used to cause so much mirth among the locals back then, these people were unstylish from desperation and no one laughed.

  Refugees.

  They might have enough money for a cup of weak ersatz coffee, but they had nowhere else to while away the hours as they awaited visas that would probably never come. Their clothes were shabby because they were at the end of a tether leading back to Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Warsaw or Lvov that they could not finally cut. Their chatter was brittle and subdued, while some sat mute and alone, lost in their own tragedy.

  Henk’s clothes were of an even worse order of shabbiness, his coat smudged and dusty, his trousers torn; and his boots, tough as they were, looked as if he’d walked from Vienna. He couldn’t help that, she conceded; she herself looked a fright if her reflection in the windows was any guide. She was changing her mind about leaving him here. Once inside, he’d let his damnation of a cat out, as sure as night followed day, and even if it charmed his fellow desperates, it would advertise his presence to the Germans. She was relieved that her annoyance with him could still flare. She conveniently forgot her own nationality and how her increasingly erratic Paris-pure accent might advertise her presence to the enemy just as effectively.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Henk demanded as he sensed her dithering. Impatient, he told her he would look after himself. In two hours, he would sit somewhere along the balustrade looking out at the view. If she didn’t turn up, he would come back again every half hour until ten o’clock, when he would assume she’d been arrested and that would be that. To this unsentimental conclusion, Eleanor readily agreed. If she was arrested, too bad; she was hungry and dirty and fed up. With her next breath, she knew she didn’t mean that and watched him as anxiously as any lover seeing her beloved walk off into possible danger. Realising what was going on, she snapped herself out of it.

  She walked towards the part of the town she remembered, though it took her past the occupier. Lacking the fury that had carried her into the Kommandantur in Paris only days before, the sight of the guards outside the Armistice Commission in their sinister steel helmets was enough to turn her stomach.

  As if she needed any reminding of her situation, she soon found she was passing the Spanish consulate, where the nationalist flag flapped from the staff and where Spanish civil guards in their black tricornio hats and warm capes held back a queue of stateless and listless misery pressed against doors that rarely opened. They had been there the day before, probably the night as well – you couldn’t lose your position in the line. She with her American passport could easily have jumped the queue, but no longer. Though she still found it hard to believe, she was a wanted woman whose luck so far had held out. Her only protection now was her cash, her remaining stash of cigarettes and her wits.

  To cap her travails, she soon found herself in front of the same hotel in which she’d spent her honeymoon with Roméo the louse. Here she’d lost the child that Hettie Rosen taunted her about so recently; here she’d discovered that he was a bigamist and had only married her because of the child, a sort of rogue’s honour. The louse had at least paid the bill before decamping. Being here again, was it history as farce? This was not a memory she liked to revisit, particularly her obtuseness in the face of many warning signs, not least of which was that she, supposedly one of love’s new storytellers, had not been in love with him. Yes, she’d tried to persuade herself that she was, but only a fool would have acted on such a quicksand of motivation. Why, then, had she been so foolish? Reaching thirty was a good candidate. And why did it still nag at her? Now she was forty-one – not a good age for a woman, even in France. And yes, she was alone again, and childless, thank you, Hettie; thank you, Mother. She might be terrified she’d fallen for, or was falling for, an unattainable louse, but at least she wasn’t broke.

  She kept walking, not knowing at all where she was heading or what she might do. Yes, a hotel, she was finding somewhere to stay the night. Tomorrow, she’d find passages into Spain if it took every dollar she had.

  RUE HE
DAS, PAU

  Around 5pm, Friday, 12th December 1941

  Eleanor went from one end of the town to the other without securing even a hint of a single bed, let alone two. She’d decided to forget the old fashionable hotels, which turned out to be wise as most had been snapped up by the Germans when the Armistice Commission and all their other commissions turned up after May 1940. The less fashionable were bulging with the less fashionable: refugees from the Nazis and just as many from Franco.

  After returning to the street of her ancient unhappiness, she turned down another, which crossed a bridge. Her memory revived. Below was a sort of no-man’s-land ravine that began behind the chateau and ran through the newer nineteenth-century town, a place where not long before, open sewers had run. A place to avoid, the hotel concierge had warned her then.

  NO PASARÁN! – They shall not pass – was freshly daubed in defiance on a wall. Here, the Spanish Civil War was not over.

  She continued, with fading hope. Spanish voices echoed along the street, aggressive and loud. She could only smile, if grimly. Losing herself among a swarm of refugee Spanish republicans would be an ironic turn for a capital R republican of a Rhode Island variety. Came the tart thought too of what a home away from home this would be for Henk and his little darling. Why, she could hardly wait to tell him. But any amusing anticipation was tempered by the failing light.

  As elsewhere in the town, just about every house advertised itself, officially or not, as a pension de famille, though the English translation ‘boarding house’ more accurately described them. Each was as uninviting as the next. She knocked on the first door. Looking for a room? Nothing here. Nothing in the next house, where Spanish was the only language on offer. Even the next, which had a sign saying ROOM FOR RENT. She was told to fuck off by another, who made Fagin sound like a country gentleman. This was getting her nowhere.

  Returning, she noticed an alley through a doorway. Nothing ventured. She went through it and descended along a narrow, curved path lined by tiny houses stinking of unwashed bodies. Where the path gave out at the bottom were makeshift houses, some of canvass, some of tin, huddled against the foundations of the buildings that backed on to the ravine. Ashy smoke from chimneys that had the uncertain luxury of wood for making fires was filling the valley like a tubercular soup. She could taste it. And with no street lamps, the shadows from the walls along the winding path were turning sinister and threatening. This was just the place she could get herself robbed and her throat cut. She felt for the knife in her pocket, which provided some semblance of courage, although given her singular lack of experience, this was the courage of a fool. Possibly the sight of it would be intimidating if she got into trouble.

  This was ridiculous. She’d find no hotel among this warren of unwanted humanity. Yet she did.

  HôTEL COSMOPOLITAN said the small sign, which, as Eleanor was to discover, was true, though in its own unique way. A rare electric light over the doorway was encouraging. Even more encouraging, it gave out real light. She saw this was not some death trap made of tin or wattle and daub and packed with detritus from the Spanish Civil War, but one of a set of real buildings fronting the laneway along the ravine. Here was the very frontier of respectability, desperate though it might be.

  She went to the door under the sign and rang the bell. It tinkled so gently you’d think fairies might have lived within. After some short time, the door opened and rather than proud Titania, an aged woman presented herself, all skin and bone and a death’s head skull capped by a bonnet. She kept dabbing her dripping red nose with a handkerchief that looked to Eleanor as if it could spread the plague.

  ‘What do you want?’ the woman demanded.

  This was not encouraging, but Eleanor had run out of possibilities.

  ‘A room for one,’ she requested. Given the Germans were looking for an American woman and a young man with a cat, she thought it best to represent herself as a femme seule and as French as the Eiffel. Not that this helped her immediately.

  ‘Nope,’ said the concierge through her sniffle. ‘You won’t find a rathole in the whole town.’

  Eleanor thought she was already in one, but instead of opening her mouth, she opened her wallet. In the blink of an eye, the mannerless slattern became a saint, crossed herself and said, ‘Forgive me, madame, I have to be so careful these days. I run a respectable place, but look around you.’ She drew Eleanor inside and quickly shut the door. ‘I like to help people. You’ve no idea the types we see here now, criminals all of them,’ she said, going around behind the counter, putting her glasses on and looking at the register. Her eyes barely glanced at the page before she closed it.

  ‘You’re a lady, I can see that,’ said the woman. ‘I might be able to offer you something suitable. I do like to help people, you know.’

  She introduced herself as Madame Dumas and beckoned Eleanor to follow her up a narrow flight of stairs, which creaked as if each step rested on the back of a frog. Eleanor wondered how she was to spirit Henk up to the room later when every step was an alarm bell. Voices came from behind every door – French, German and possibly Polish or Czech, she couldn’t tell. The place was bulging with people. They climbed another flight of stairs, which at least didn’t creak. Behind one door on the next floor, someone was playing a violin. Could that really be Beethoven? Another door opened and two young women burst out, whispering excitedly in German, but the sight of the concierge stopped their chatter mid-word. Eleanor observed they looked frightened as they hurried past down the stairs on their way out.

  ‘Jews,’ said Madame Dumas. ‘Poor things. I try to help them as best I can.’

  They climbed the last set of stairs, which led to the attic level.

  ‘Nice and quiet,’ she said as she opened the door to the room, ‘for someone refined like yourself.’

  Two beds, thank God, the first thing Eleanor looked for. The roof was steep and so low that she had to stoop, but at least the room was serviceable – a wardrobe, a chair, a washstand with a basin – and it was clean. She felt the beds.

  ‘No bed bugs,’ said the concierge. ‘Very nice and cosy.’ The toilet was at the end of the hallway on the floor below. ‘With hot running water,’ she said proudly. ‘You won’t get that anywhere else here.’

  A couple of long doghouse dormers with small windows let in some light.

  ‘Best kept closed,’ advised Madame Dumas, although how anyone above the age of three could manoeuvre themselves out to open or shut the windows seemed impossible to Eleanor. No matter.

  She asked how much and was surprised the woman didn’t try to cheat her by asking some exorbitant amount. For want of anything better, she agreed. Relieved, Eleanor sat on the bed and took out her cigarettes. She deserved one. She’d hardly savoured the first draught when the woman returned. She needed to see ‘Madame’s documents’. A concierge, she explained, had to register everyone with the prefecture as a matter of course. This was a respectable hotel.

  Eleanor followed her back down the stairs.

  ‘Toulouse?’ said Madame Dumas, evoking doubt.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘A lovely city, Toulouse,’ said Madame Dumas as she scratched the details into her register. ‘I thought perhaps you might be American.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Eleanor, her heart sinking.

  ‘You’re smoking those expensive American cigarettes,’ said Madame Dumas. ‘Only Americans or black marketeers smoke American.’

  ‘You’ve exposed me,’ said Eleanor lightly.

  ‘Hah,’ Madame Dumas chuckled, dabbing her nose, ‘I knew you were American. Your French is so good, though, one would never know.’

  ‘Your second guess was correct,’ said Eleanor, ‘although “black marketeer” is such a coarse word, don’t you think? I prefer “businesswoman” myself.’

  Before the concierge could respond, Eleanor opened her cigarette case. ‘Would you like one?’ she offered. Yes, Madame Dumas most certainly would, even with her chest, what’s the
harm in just one? As Eleanor lit the cigarette for her, she noticed the woman’s pupils fix on the lighter, then back to the case. Lean and hungry as Cassius, she observed; she sensed the woman also had Cassius’s itching palm.

  ‘I’m sure we can come to some arrangement,’ she said, opening her wallet. ‘Such are the times, are they not?’

  ‘Well,’ said Madame Dumas, ‘I can see you’re really a lady. Yes, times are so difficult now. And I like to help people. Are you staying long?’

  ‘Two days only,’ said Eleanor, ‘but I might have to extend.’

  ‘You go up and make yourself comfortable, Madame Roget,’ said Dumas. ‘I’ll send the boy up with a nice basin of hot water.’

  As she went back up the stairs, she heard Madame Dumas’s raised voice, berating and caustic in Creole, and then she heard a slap and a yelp. The concierge’s kindness went in only one direction.

  Soon came a knock on Eleanor’s door, and there stood a boy of about twelve or thirteen, a basin of steaming water in his hands. ‘Señora,’ he said shyly. The recent slap was still evident on his face. She beckoned him in with a nice smile. He set the basin down. She told him to wait and felt in the pocket of her coat for some francs, but noticed his eyes on her cigarette case, so she asked if he would like one. The shy, sad little face broke into such a smile as he carefully removed one cigarette. ‘Gracias, señora,’ he said and then he reached into his pocket and produced a cake of soap and handed it to her. Eleanor saw it was real. He put his finger to his lips, which formed a cheeky smile. Don’t tell. She could have kissed him. Instead, she gave him the remaining two cigarettes in the case.

  ‘You look after me, I’ll look after you,’ said Eleanor. ‘Agreed?’ He smiled.

  Once he was gone, she liberated herself of her journey’s grime and stink. Even the sight of her much-diminished supply of cosmetics, barely enough for a couple of days under normal circumstances, lifted her mood and her spirit. She was a black marketeer after all. Rain had been threatening, so she needed to find Henk. She departed down the creaking stairs, passing an older man trudging up. So many people came and went, she figured, the lower flight of stairs might not be the problem she had initially thought.