Violins of Autumn (Lisette de Valmy)

by Amy McAuley

  The guards lay on the ground before me. One has a bloody hole for a third eye.

  A car speeds toward me. I slide one foot in front of the other, every movement a battle of wills with my twitching muscles. The white light returns. Through a pinpoint I see the car pull up. A door squeals open on dry hinges. Another door opens. Men come at me. I claw the air, aiming above the flurry of shadowy arms and legs. My arms whirl to fight the men off.

  I won’t go to the camp. I won’t!

  “We’ve got you.”

  FORTY-ONE

  I wake little by little, wrapped in a soft cocoon of blankets.

  My eyes focus on Denise sitting at the edge of the bed, surrounded by a golden aura of candlelight.

  From my arm, a small tube travels upward to an intravenous bottle.

  The room drifts in and out of focus.

  “Where am I? Am I dreaming?”

  She holds my hand. Real and true and not a figment of a dream, she says, “Dr. Devereux had a hard enough time getting that liquid into you, don’t waste it on tears.”

  I struggle to hold on to the vague image of her face. It blurs to nothingness. I lose it.

  “Go back to sleep. You’re safe.”

  When I wake next, Dr. Devereux has taken up Denise’s vigil in the chair. Sunshine stealing through the partially drawn curtains has replaced the candlelight.

  I look around the prettily decorated room. I’ve been here before, when Dr. Devereux allowed me to spend the night in his home.

  He pats my hand. “How are you feeling?”

  “As if I slept for days.”

  “That is no coincidence. And you have more bed rest ahead of you.” Checking my IV, he says, “It’s a miracle Bishop and I found you when we did. The state your body was in, under shock and dehydration that severe, another day and it would have been too late.”

  Too late. My heart aches for Christina and whatever fate lies ahead of her.

  I’ve swung from one extreme form of security to another without a link between them. As horrifying as prison was, it became my life. Now, surrounded by comfort and freedom, I don’t know what to make of the change.

  “This seems unreal,” I say. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I’m confused, Dr. Devereux. How did I get here?”

  “I imagine your rescue must feel as overwhelming as it does a relief,” he says. “Let’s save the discussion of details for a later time. For the time being, know this: you have many friends who are willing to do just about anything in the world for you.”

  From the door, Denise says, “One of them happens to be the best shot I’ve ever seen.”

  “You shot the guards?”

  “Adele, do you know of anyone else who can shoot like that? The kicker is I used a Mauser we stole from a crashed German truck. They probably didn’t bat an eye when they heard shots fired from one of their own weapons. Brilliant how it all came together.” Grinning, Denise says, “Did you know we were coming for you?”

  I shake my head, confused. “No. How was I to know?”

  Dr. Devereux briefly stops taking notes on a clipboard to ask, “Did you receive the parcel we sent to Fresnes?”

  The overwhelming emotions of that day come flooding back. “Yes, I received a parcel.”

  “It was a sign from us,” Denise says. “We found out where you were being held. We were working on a plan to free you. Did it give you hope?”

  At the time, I thought only about the food, not what its arrival should have signaled to me. I can’t explain that to them, though, without having to relive a moment of savage hunger I’d rather forget.

  All I can say is, “Thank you.”

  “I’ll leave you two to talk,” Dr. Devereux says.

  “Is that a new skirt?” I say, as Denise passes the end of my bed.

  “New skirt? Why, it’s a whole new outfit. One of the bedroom closets is overflowing with women’s clothing. I could live in it quite happily.”

  Laughing, I say, “I bet you—”

  I bite down on my quivering upper lip. The roof of my mouth hardens like a tortoise shell, until the pressure is too great. I bring my pillow out to hide behind it, breathing a fusty bouquet of medicinal scents. If I don’t grab a hold of myself, Denise will have to watch me crumble to pieces.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She lowers the pillow from my face. “It’s all right.”

  Once the tears start there is no stopping them. For every sad memory of what is lost there’s a joyful one for what remains. Denise smooths my hair, not seeming to notice or care that I’m sobbing huge patches of tears onto her blouse.

  “François told me I nearly died at the prison. I wasn’t in my right mind. I wouldn’t have even known. If not for you, Denise, I would have just been … gone. I don’t want to die at seventeen.”

  Denise sets her hands on my shoulders and gently puts some space between us.

  “Wait.” She positions the pillow behind my back for support. “What did you say?”

  “I lied about my age to come here,” I say. “Just like Robbie did.”

  Denise’s face crumples and she turns away on the edge of the bed. She stares at the street below through the window.

  “When I saw you collapsed in the backseat of François’s car, it scared me half to death. He showed me the horrific wounds they left. I can’t believe what they did to you.” She turns back to look at me, her eyes brimming with tears.

  I clasp my hands, pale from months without sunshine, on my lap. “I’m sorry I lied,” I say, sniffling back tears. “People trusted me. They were relying on me. I abandoned them.”

  “You abandoned no one. Your courage and silence allowed Resistance activities to continue. It saved many lives, including mine. Do you have any idea how I feel, knowing”—she covers her face—“what they must have put you through to find me and my radio? Please don’t tell me I’m right, I couldn’t bear to hear you say it, but I know that I am. The thought of you being tortured and near death, protecting me all the while—”

  Denise buries her face in my blanket, sobbing uncontrollably. After what feels like an eternity, she lifts her head. Crying has washed the prettiness from her pale-gray eyes. Her sunburned nose looks as if it’s been rubbed to a scalded shade of red.

  “I thought this was supposed to be a happy reunion.” Denise passes one of two handkerchiefs on the bedside table to me and contains her sniffling with the other. “These things are terribly unhygienic. How I miss disposable tissues.” Behind the kerchief, she mumbles, “Blasted war.”

  I pat my eyes dry, saying, “Denise, between my capture and now, I haven’t heard a thing about the invasion. It was like living inside a bubble. Hasn’t Paris been liberated?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “But I was about to be moved to a camp in Germany. The Allies must be close?”

  “They are.”

  “What about Bishop, and Madame LaRoche, and—” When I think of Pierre, I struggle to say, “Pierre’s men?”

  “Bishop is Bishop, invincible as ever. Madame LaRoche is holding on, but Pierre’s death hit her very hard. Her daughter, Elise, has gone to live with her.” Denise folds her kerchief into a neat square on her lap. “And the agents Cammerts introduced us to at the café before we returned to the farm? Both are feared dead.”

  I close my eyes to take in the gravity of all that has happened since that night at the factory. How could I have been thoughtlessly smug about those agents meeting a bad end?

  “Within hours of Pierre’s death, his men armed themselves and joined forces with other circuits to attack an elite Panzer tank division on its way to Normandy. They hounded it for hundreds of miles, doing everything they could think of to slow it down or stop it. Firefights, grenades, you name it. They fought until their ammunition ran out. Big Edgar and Marcus were quite proud of their idea to fell massive trees across the roads and hide anti-tank mines beneath them. They tied up hundreds of tanks and thousands of men for fifteen days. Th
e entire Panzer division didn’t reach the beaches in time to do much more than twiddle their thumbs.”

  I think back to the day Pierre introduced us to a ragtag group of men at the camp, and how little faith I had in them. “Really? They did all that?”

  “They did. Bishop believes that was crucial to the success of the Allies’ advance after D-day. Men you trained did that, Adele. They were willing to fight to get their country back, but you helped make it possible for them.” Holding my hand in hers, Denise looks me straight in the eyes. “Don’t you dare feel guilty about a thing, my friend. You are a hero.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Denise and Marie embarked on a mission to nurse me back to health. There was no talking them out of it. It took a while for me to realize Denise was doing some healing of her own. Even though she wasn’t responsible for the torture I endured, I could convince only her mind of that. Not her heart. If she needed to help me, I owed her the chance to do it.

  In the weeks I grew stronger and healthier, Paris weakened, as its occupiers packed up and pulled out. By the middle of August, the Metro no longer ran at all, electricity became available only for an hour or two each day—and then during the middle of the night when hardly anyone needed it—restaurants closed up for days at a stretch, and the city fell into a state of chaos and fear, with firefights between the Resistance and remaining Germans taking place in the streets.

  But during that time, normal life began to return. On daily walks like the one Denise, Marie, and I are about to set off on, we saw hundreds of children playing in the Seine to cool off in the summer heat and a couple eagerly prying apart the makeshift wooden signs that relabeled the streets in German.

  “You look good today,” Marie says. Cradling my face in her hands, she rotates my head left and right. “The sun has put some color back into your cheeks. Did you take your vitamin supplements this morning? Did you eat every bite of your breakfast?”

  I squirm free. “Yes, I did. Denise tried to force-feed me the last time I didn’t.”

  Overhearing me as she steps outside and closes the door to Dr. Devereux’s home, Denise laughs.

  “I will do whatever is necessary to have you looking like your old self again,” she says. “Protruding hipbones and sunken cheeks will never be in fashion.”

  The two months I spent away from a mirror has given me a distorted sense of my self-image. Looking down at my body in prison, I saw slimmer arms and legs. I ran my hands over bony bumps and ridges that used to be comfortably padded. But I assumed I looked pretty much the same as always, just a little thinner. Nothing could have prepared me for seeing the girl who gaped back at me from the gilded mirror in Dr. Devereux’s upper hallway when I got the go-ahead to leave my bed. Her gaunt face, sinewy neck, and dead stare repulsed me. She’s a stranger. I don’t want to be her.

  It feels as if my interrogators still maintain a hold over my life, a stranglehold at my throat. I was freed from prison, but I’m not free from what they did to me there.

  “Last evening, there was a firefight at the end of our avenue,” Marie says as we walk. “The Resistance shot two German soldiers dead. From my bedroom window I saw their bodies, lying in the middle of the street where they fell. Two women ran over and stole the boots right off their dead feet, to sell on the black market, I guess. The fighting was so close a stray bullet hit the stone lion that guards the entrance to our building. Poor Gustav. He has only one good ear now.”

  We jump back to the safety of the sidewalk when a truck speeds around the corner. It rounds another corner so quickly I barely have time to make out the faded mark of the French Forces of the Interior on the truck’s side.

  “The truck was transporting women,” Marie says. “Why do you think that is?”

  “Let’s find out,” Denise says, striding away.

  It seems like only yesterday I had athletic abilities to take pride in. I fall into an uncoordinated run, determined to keep up with Denise and Marie.

  By the time we catch up with the truck a boisterous crowd is already gathering around it. Through a separation between two onlookers, I watch a man wearing an FFI armband raise a pair of scissors into the air. He shows the long blades of gleaming steel to the crowd. A cheer goes up.

  People emerge from all directions to join the crowd. Denise, Marie, and I work into places at the outskirts of the group.

  Another member of the French Forces jumps into the back of the open truck. Above his head, he shakes a battered paper sign that reads LE CHAR DES COLLABORATRICES.

  The women in the truck collaborated with the Germans.

  Whenever the crowd shifts, I glimpse the four women, lined up and on display for all to see, covering their faces with their hands in shame.

  The wielder of the scissors waves a fistful of chestnut-brown hair. The crowd roars. They hurl insults. When he has chopped the length of the woman’s hair until nothing but stubble remains, he moves on to the next woman. The taunting continues.

  The brutality of being roughly shorn like some farm animal resonates through me. A terrible wave of nausea sweeps over me.

  Men press against me to get a better look, closing me in, tapping my feet out of the way with their boots. Elbows jostle for space. I feel the tension budding in the air, eager to bloom into violent bedlam.

  A man in the crowd cracks one of the women on the back of her head with his hand. I tremble, unable to catch my breath, listening to her cries.

  Denise lays her hand on my shoulder. “Adele, maybe you shouldn’t be watching this.”

  As Denise directs me by the arm, the woman who was shaved first lowers her hands from her face. Our gazes connect and lock for an instant. Her expression is one I wished to never again see on another woman. I have to look away.

  Crying, Marie says, “Those poor women. Someone should do something to stop that.”

  “No!” Denise says, and her vehement retort makes Marie cry even harder. “Women like those four sent fellow countrymen and women to abysmal prisons. To German camps. To starvation and slow, agonizing deaths. Women like our Adele. Traitors are what they are, the lot of them. So they could be wined and dined and knock boots with a German officer? For God’s sake, it’s only hair. It will grow back. They’re getting off lucky, if you ask me!”

  Denise storms ahead of us, swiping at her eyes. She stops abruptly in the middle of the street and waits for us to catch up.

  She hooks her arm through Marie’s and says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lashed out at you.”

  “I understand.” Marie blushes, unable to look Denise in the eye. “And you’re right. It is only hair, after all.”

  Yes, it may be only hair. But without hers, Dr. Devereux’s wife isn’t nearly as pretty.

  From my bed, I listen to Denise’s footsteps padding down the hallway. Her distinctive tiptoe usually returns to a chipper march once she’s passed my bedroom, but this time she doesn’t go beyond the partially closed door. My afternoon nap will have to wait.

  “Adele, are you awake?” she whispers.

  I roll onto my back. “Yeah, come on in.”

  Denise slowly enters the room, smiling, but something about her expression is off.

  “Denise, what’s the matter?”

  “I have news. It’s big news. I wanted to make sure you’re in the right frame of mind to deal with it. You know, with the chest pain and palpitations you’ve been having.”

  Between her pastiness and twitchy smile, I can’t read her expression at all. What is she trying to tell me? Part of me wishes she’d just come out with it, and part of me wishes she wouldn’t.

  “So, are you feeling all right, Adele?” she asks.

  After a night crammed end to end with nightmares that seemed truer than life, I’ve taken a big step backward. Dreams of the night Pierre died in my arms always leave me feeling numb and beaten up and exhausted and ready to cry at the drop of a hat. I imagine myself standing alone on the brink of a seaside cliff, engulfed by bleak, stormy skies. If I fall
to the jagged rocks beneath I won’t care. I fought to survive in prison. I could’ve given up plenty of times. And now that I’m safe, on days like today, I’m apathetic about dying.

  “I feel okay. What do you have to tell me?”

  “I have news about Robbie.”

  I practically fly into an upright position. My heart can’t take any bad news. Not today. I don’t want to know.

  “What about Robbie?” I ask.

  “Adele, he never left France.”

  Unable to speak, I vigorously shake my head, as if that might make Robbie’s death untrue. How could he not have made it out of France? Why couldn’t they get him home safely? I want to scream at Denise to take it back.

  She runs to my side, crying, “No, no, no!” She lifts my chin, forcing me to look at her through tears. “He hasn’t died! He’s still here in France.” She hugs me to her, patting my back. “My God, what have I done to you? This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen. Couldn’t you tell the big news was happy news from my ear-to-ear smile?”

  “So”—I choke out—“he’s alive?”

  “He is.” Denise raises her eyebrows, frowning with nervous uncertainty. She has more to say, but her big news announcement didn’t go the way she planned. Now she’s not sure how to continue. Finally, she blurts, “Would you like to see for yourself?”

  I take a ragged breath, sniffling. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s here. Downstairs in the front lobby. He came to find you, Adele.”

  My mind reels. Robbie is here. Downstairs. A single floor away from me?

  I look down at my weakened arms. The two unsightly fingernail nubs on my right hand. The nightgown I wear so often it must smell as bad as the grubby blanket my youngest cousin totes everywhere.

  I don’t want Robbie to see me this way. Dr. Devereux removed the large gilded mirror from the hallway outside my room, but once in a while I accidently spot my reflection in a storefront window or Denise’s round makeup mirror. I know what I look like.