Benjamin's Crossing

by Jay Parini

  The absurdity of life in the Vél d’Hiv might have amused us for several days, but the air-raid alarms sounded day and night, and so our sleep was miserably broken. (You know what I’m like when I haven’t had my rest!) And the drone of bombers overhead sent our pulses racing—such an eerie sound, the way it seems to come from nowhere. I hate those planes—malevolent wild birds swooping up from hell to blacken our skies.

  Newspapers were scarce, but we got our hands on the odd page, ripped off and smuggled around. The stories often seemed contradictory, but one thing was certain: The Germans were coming, and fast. They had smashed through the northern border, their tanks rolling over wheatfields, vineyards, orchards. Rumors circulated to the effect that whole villages had been burned and pillaged, that women had been raped, children abducted, and thousands of able-bodied men shot to prevent them from becoming enemy soldiers. If the German troops caught up to us, we were finished. Nobody doubted it.

  Two weeks in the Vél d’Hiv was enough for anyone. Paulette and I were already planning our escape (it would not have been hard, I think) when orders came for evacuation. It was horrible, because Paulette and I were to be separated. Her husband, you know, has joined the Foreign Legion, and the wives of soldiers were bundled together. I was set to be squeezed into a military bus with the hoi polloi.

  Paulette’s reaction surprised me. She began to weep these huge wet tears, and her lips quivered. I don’t know what got into her.

  “You mustn’t let them take me,” she said. She clung to me like a small child.

  “Don’t rattle yourself. You’re making me frightened!”

  I adopted a stern, don’t-give-me-trouble attitude—you will know exactly what I mean, Hans!—and it worked. Paulette grew calm, then annoyed. But anger is better than fear, so I had done my duty.

  “You’re impossible!” she cried.

  “So are you,” I said.

  “You’ve got no feelings!”

  “And you’re unreliable. Imagine what will happen to you if the going gets rough!”

  “This is rough, damn it!”

  “Nonsense. This is kindergarten. Just wait for what’s coming.”

  We continued for several minutes with our hackneyed, schoolgirlish bickering, amusing a young guard, who smoked a hand-rolled cigarette and watched us with a faint, superior smile. At one point, he said. “Easy, girls, easy.”

  The buses were ugly green beasts, and dozens of them stood hip to hip like rhinos, their engines throbbing. They belched a black smoke that seemed to strip the air of anything breathable. A crudely painted sign on each of them read: réfugiés de la zone interdite. So that was it, I thought. I was a refugee from a restricted zone! The windows were darkened, as if to hide our shame or protect the public from seeing us huddled together. Nobody said a word, we were all so terrified, and because none of us had bathed in two weeks, we smelled like barn animals. I put a woolen sweater to my nose to filter the smell, but it was quite impossible.

  I don’t know exactly where they unloaded us, but it wasn’t far away. Probably the Gare d’Austerlitz. The Germans were coming from the north, so we would head south. This was confirmed when, several hours later, we stopped briefly in the station in Tours. A smallish crowd milled on the opposite platform, and—much to my amazement—they jeered us and threw rocks at the train. I’d never before seen such hatred in human faces. I had to close my eyes.

  We rode endlessly into the blackness, the train swallowing the rails whole, swaying, whistling through tiny stations so quickly you couldn’t read the names. I don’t know how many days and nights we rode. Two or three? Even the days seemed dark. And there was scarcely enough food; we would pass around a tin of pâté, a crust of bread, a cup of bad water. The toilets in the train were locked except for a brief period at night and in the morning for an hour or so. People were shitting in their underpants, pissing between cars. One old woman moaned continuously, something about her son, who apparently had some position of authority. “He will murder all of you!” Once a soldier brought around a pot of hot food. “What is it?” the woman beside me asked, as if it mattered. “Du singe,” he said. Monkey meat. They call any kind of meat singe.

  It felt like we had crossed a continent, and we all wondered where on earth they could possibly be taking us. None of the soldiers would dare to say a word. Then one morning soon after dawn I felt the train slowing; in the middle distance, the faint outline of a small city could be seen. The brakes began to squeal, and the train rocked from side to side. I can’t say how, exactly, but I knew it was Gurs. The camp had been built rather hastily for refugees from the civil war, I believe. In any case, I remembered the stories Lars told us about Gurs, and I shuddered.

  Over a narrow footbridge, through a barbed-wire fence, we trickled in a stream, entering the camp through a gate in the snaggle of barbed wire surrounding it. The female guards acted like little Nazis, yelling “One-two, one-two, quickly, girls! Step quickly!” We were “processed” at the so-called Reception Center, a low-roofed block building whose architect could not have entertained the slightest notion of aesthetics, then funneled into one of the dozens of barracks laid out in precise rows.

  I hated my barracks immediately. The roof is tin, without virtue except in a rainstorm, when it makes the most wonderful, continuous hum. One bare lightbulb, a pathetic object suffocating from a lack of voltage, casts a pale glow over three dozen straw pallets pushed close together along each wall. They lay on the clay floor, damp and moldy as old cheese, riddled with mice and bugs. I don’t know why, but I cried for the first time when I saw the pallets, just lying there on the floor, without cots. I had somehow expected cots.

  It’s best to get on with things, as you always say, so I slung my rucksack onto one of the pallets and was about to plop myself down when a fierce-looking young woman with snarled red hair screamed, “That’s mine, you bitch!” Temper, temper, I thought, taking my few belongings elsewhere. I don’t think she is in her right mind, the poor thing.

  I was glad that several of the others in my barracks were acquaintances, if not friends. Remember Anni? She and I found pallets together, and it was like old times. We quickly forgot how awful everything was, for a little while. Hans, I was so, so tired. Even the bedbugs could hardly penetrate my consciousness. It was like falling into a deep, even bottomless, well; whatever nonsense went on above ground hardly mattered as I toppled, end over end, through the endless dark. The world might have been coming to an end, and it wouldn’t have mattered.

  The guards—most of them women in the barracks—are generally unsympathetic, I must say. Hitler will love these natural-born fascists, though it perhaps dignifies them to ascribe an ideology to their behavior; they know nothing but power. “Do what I command or I’ll make your life miserable,” they seem to be saying, even when they don’t speak. “Out of bed, ladies!” they shout at seven. “Line up!” “Clean up!” “Stand up!” “Shut up!” Everything up, up, up! The only thing to raise my spirits are the hills, the Pyrenees, a luminous blue line in the middle distance that spells one word in my heart: freedom. Spain beckons, so beautiful and beyond human foible. At least that is how it looks from behind these bars.

  Let me get back to the bedbugs, which have become a major topic of conversation. We’ve had plenty of bugs together, Hans, have we not? If I remember right, you were the one who hated insects, like that time you got covered in bird lice, those little creatures more like white dust than members of the insect kingdom. You shrieked and danced! The doctor sprayed us with noxious chemicals at the hospital—it’s a wonder he didn’t kill us. Well, our pallets were so infested, so thick with maggoty things that swarmed and crawled and snapped, that I enclosed a dead one in an envelope and tried to convince our guard—a fairly decent woman, as prison guards go—to pass it along to the commandant. She opened it and said, “If you don’t like French bedbugs, maybe y
ou will prefer those of the Nazi persuasion.”

  If we were brought here for our own protection, why do they treat us like criminals? Is there something wrong with the so-called French mind? I questioned one of the guards, a fairly innocuous woman named Nicole, about this incarceration, and she said blithely that the camp was indeed full of Nazis: Reichsdeutsche. Spies. This is silly, of course. Only one woman in our barracks could be described as a genuine Nazi, and she actually worked for the German government in Paris as some vaguely official representative. But how do you reason with blockheads?

  We began to communicate among ourselves, and this brought an immediate sense of hope. Our courage grew. One day we decided to organize a committee, and this committee would demand a meeting with the commandant. Nicole, the “good guard,” as we called her, took a petition to his office on our behalf, and he proved more reasonable than you would suppose. We were allowed to elect a leader from each barracks, and the group of leaders formed a kind of unofficial parliament. Suddenly, the guards began to treat us more like human beings. All it took was a little gumption.

  You remember Sala, don’t you? From Berlin, with the crooked nose? She is here and feisty as ever, forever holding meetings. The irony of her situation kills her, she says. Here she is, imprisoned by the enemies of Germany for distributing anti-German propaganda! We have put her in charge of everything, and that makes life easier for me. I feel like I can rest, knowing somebody is doing something to enhance my living conditions all the time! Praise Allah for Sala!

  Some of the things here would amuse you, darling. The absurdities, I mean. The women rise early, in the thumbnail light of dawn, shivering, and begin putting on their makeup. Even Anni, who is not a beauty, as you may recall, pencils her eyebrows and rolls her hair! One of the women here, Louise, was a hairdresser in Paris, and she comes around every day and, for a cigarette, will comb your hair.

  You should see them all, strutting and preening. At noon they gather outside in the yard to wave at a yellow biplane that flies low over the camp almost every day. The helmeted airman (who has perhaps been airborne since the last war) waves back at them gallantly, and sometimes tips his wing, ever so slightly, for their titillation. “He saw me! He saw me!” they yell, dancing like schoolgirls. This is what passes for a sex life in Gurs.

  A lot of what I see is sad. There is one strange girl, Gisela, who sleeps on the floor near me, on a pallet so thin it can offer no comfort. She apparently saw the Nazis beat her father with a rifle butt till his head burst; he died on the floor in his wife’s arms. Her mother came here at the tail end of a long fight with cancer, her skin high yellow like an octoroon’s, her eyes sunk deep in her skull like old nails. The unfortunate woman would go outside on wobbly knees every afternoon to lie on a rough wool blanket that Gisela would spread out in the dirt. In the evenings, she would sing her mother to sleep in a soft, hollow voice, singing folk songs I had never heard before. What surprised me was the lack of conversation between them; they seemed content to sit in each other’s presence. Perhaps there was just too much to say to make the attempt at speech worthwhile? Or maybe the opposite was true. That such terrible things had happened to them and continued happening to them was perhaps beyond the claims of language. In any case, the mother died a few days ago. I was right there, beside her, and I saw her crumble like a burnt-out coal: the shape intact for a while, then imploding, then nothing but ash to scatter in the wind.

  Gisela did not cry or even speak when they took her mother away. She was expressionless, tearless, drowned in an ocean of grief, I suppose. She has been sitting on her pallet all day today, the husk of her. The blue circles under her eyes have deepened, and she rarely opens her eyes. I tried to talk to her this morning, and offered a cigarette, but she didn’t even respond. Not even a nod of the head or a grunt. I’m a little afraid for her, I think. One can stand only so much.

  A pompous but amusing woman called Ili sleeps on a pallet across the room from me. I don’t think you knew her, but she was always around in Paris—a friend of Julie Farendot, I think. I used to see her across the room at big parties, so eye-catching in her furs and jewelry; she was perpetually smoking cigarettes through a long ivory holder, and blowing smoke rings. She used to annoy me, but not now. I rather like her gumption and bravura. We need more like her to get through this war.

  She told me that when the Nazis swept through Vienna, they dragged Jewish women into the streets and made them clean sidewalks on their knees. Ili stormed onto the pavement in her furs and jewels and shouted at the bastards, “Give me a broom! I insist!” They said, “Please, madame, we don’t want you. Go back inside.” “I am a Jew!” she cried. “Give me a broom or I’ll complain to your superiors!” They slunk off meekly. Don’t you love it? They are cowards, you know, these goose-steppers. They are just hiding in those uniforms.

  Ili brought a paint set with her: oils, brushes, even some rolled canvas, which she stretches on frames supplied by the guards, who seem only too eager to oblige her. (If you ask for a slice of bread, they spit at you, but if you want a frame for a canvas painting, that’s apparently more like it!) On our second day in Gurs, she set up her studio outside on the lawn and began to paint. It was rather dramatic, as a gesture, and people gathered around her to watch, baffled but intrigued. And now she is giving lessons! I suppose there is no point in trying to tell her you cannot live by art alone….

  You certainly can’t live on the food. Chickpeas every day, then more chickpeas. They come like little pebbles, dry and tasteless, and you have to soak them overnight in rusty water, then cook them for an hour. You get maybe a dozen or fifteen peas in all, nasty pellets that you mouth slowly till they form a tasteless mash you can swallow. The guards come around in the morning with a cup of fake coffee that’s so bad you want to puke after the first sip.

  Sometimes we get a rubbery carrot or clump of stale cabbage. The potatoes are moldy and black. Loaves of bread are divided with the kind of stinginess you would imagine, one loaf among half a dozen women. You get your portion in the morning, then you have to gauge how much to eat at once. I try to hold off, letting my hunger build to the point where it hurts and I can’t stand it; then I force myself beyond that point, eating only when the hunger subsides. That seems to work best, though I don’t understand it.

  The only chance we get to wash is in the morning, when it’s so cold you don’t want to do it anyway. A long and muddy trough runs along the barbed-wire fence behind the barracks, with a pipe running parallel to the fence and spigots poking out like teats along it. The hardy souls who decide to clean themselves that day line up, naked, and race through the cold water, which sometimes dribbles and sometimes gushes. Like everyone else, I try to wash my clothes while I’m there, but it’s not easy. Soap is impossible to come by, though I did remember to bring some with me. When it’s gone, I’ll have to rely on elbow grease like the rest—or be content to smell.

  The soldiers who guard the outposts and checkpoints like to stare at the women when they bathe, and this panics some of the younger ones. There is a particularly prudish girl, about seventeen, who refuses to take off her underwear at all. It’s the age, I suppose: the fear that every lid is the top of Pandora’s box. I must say, I really don’t give a damn. Let them see me. Who cares?

  I’m a little more hesitant about performing private acts in public when it comes to the latrines, which are dazzling constructions, reminiscent of a gallows. One looms behind us, not a few steps from the barracks. You climb a rickety ladder to a wooden platform perched on stilts; they’ve cut round holes in the floor and put metal tanks below to collect the shit and piss as it falls. These are emptied every morning, much to my relief (since I sleep by a window that opens right onto it!).

  These French troops are Germanic in their efficiency, which scares me. I fear the worst when the full Occupation comes. Imagine: They have laid narrow-gauge tracks along the ba
ck fence; it runs by each of the latrines on a regular schedule. The Spaniards hired to do the dirty work come every morning on flatbed cars to empty the tanks on their miniature train—we call it the Gold Express—which rumbles from latrine to latrine, driven by an impassive old gentleman with long white hair and ice-blue eyes. If you happen to be doing your duty when the Express comes, you just hold your nose and gaze to the fields beyond the fence, where dandelions ready to be blown to smithereens by the slightest winds blanket a gentle slope.

  I’m writing to keep my sanity, Hans. There is something gloriously essential about getting this language onto the page, about making the translation (however crude) from feelings into words. Does this make sense to you, darling?

  My dear, it is so hard being separated from you, even though I believe, I know, you are all right. You are always all right. That is, if anyone is, you will be. I fell in love with you because I sensed, I understood in my bones, that you were indestructible. When I look into your eyes, I see it: diamondlike, immortal. The body may fail, but your spirit won’t. It simply can’t, any more than Plato can fall from the Western intellectual sky. Some things will not change.

  It’s terribly important, in Gurs, to count one’s blessings. Lucky for me I’ve not been dumped in the barracks reserved for “undesirables.” These women have been here much longer than the rest of us, and I pity them, even though some are indeed Nazis. Most seem to be anti-fascists of one kind or another, and a few are well known in these circles. They somehow ran afoul of the Deuxième Bureau, that gang of thugs hiding behind their fancy desks and nameplates on the doors.

  These women are starving to death, so we hear. I’ve organized a group to smuggle bread to them through the double barbed-wire fence. It’s a little dangerous, but the truth is I enjoy this smuggling. It takes one’s mind off the cruder details of everyday life and makes one feel so curiously alive. Remember how it was in Prague, with the two of us sneaking around the city at night, meeting with different cells, trying to keep Masaryk’s boys from discovering what we were doing? And in Switzerland, setting up the network? I still can’t believe you talked me into slipping over the German border for those meetings in Baden and Württemberg. What if they’d caught me? We were crazy, Hans. Crazy for a cause, I suppose. For freedom. Neither you nor I can bear injustice when it hits us in the face. This drives us forward, doesn’t it? But it’s a good drive, the need to feel alive and free, to know you are doing something to preserve human dignity. God knows, there is little enough left in the world.