“Very sly of you, Claude,” Madeleine said.
She feigned irritation even as she reluctantly acknowledged that his concern pleased her. She smiled and placed her hand in his. Side by side, they leaned against the railing that rimmed the Pont de l’Alma and stared down at the silver-fringed waters of the Seine.
Five
The very next week, Anna accompanied Madeleine to Dr. Levin’s office and sat patiently in his waiting room while the gentle, soft-spoken doctor conducted his examination. He was very thorough, shining his scope into each of her ears and then testing her hearing.
He sighed.
“I assume that it is difficult for you to hear when you are not directly facing the speaker,” he said. “Is that so, Mademoiselle Levy?”
“Yes. I have grown skilled at reading lips, but I wondered if a hearing aid might help me.”
He shook his head regretfully.
“I am afraid not. The scarlet fever that you suffered as a child caused nerve damage, and we have not yet developed instruments to remedy that. Research is ongoing, of course, but for now there is no relief that I can offer you.”
“Will my hearing grow worse?” she asked hesitantly.
“We cannot say. Actually, you have been fortunate to retain the auditory capacity you have, but we cannot predict the progress of a deficit like your own. There is some anecdotal literature indicating that stress may impact negatively. My only advice to you would be to avoid tension and stress,” he said.
He smiled bitterly, aware of the absurdity of his own advice.
Madeleine shook her head wearily.
“I appreciate your words, but how does one avoid tension in today’s Paris? Stress is in the very air we breathe. Still, may I call you now and again to ascertain if there is any progress in audiology research as it relates to my difficulty?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“I am afraid not. I am leaving Paris very soon. My wife has relations in Australia, and they have arranged visas for us. I fear that Jews are no longer safe in France,” he said sadly.
Madeleine nodded and glanced toward the door, which was slightly ajar. She caught a glimpse of Anna’s face, her eyes wide with fear, her lips trembling. The child had heard the doctor’s words, his dark prediction. Madeleine turned to him and extended her hand.
“I wish you and your family bonne chance, good luck,” she said.
“The Jews of France will need more than luck. I worry about the children. If only we could secure the safety of our children,” he murmured.
“We in the éclaireurs are working hard to protect the children, to prepare them for what may come,” she assured him.
She did not add that she herself was putting all her energy into that effort. Anna and the other children in her group were being carefully schooled to assume the new identities that might save their lives. They were taught to memorize the catechism in the event that they might have to pass as Christians. They went on long hikes in preparation for anticipated treks over the mountain passes of the Alps or the Pyrenees. They were small hostages to a destiny fraught with danger and uncertainty. Madeleine could not, would not share that knowledge with Dr. Levin. Like all scout leaders, she was pledged to secrecy. Trust was a rare commodity. They had been warned that everyone was suspect.
“Betrayal may come from anywhere, even from our own people,” Robert Gamzon had said.
“I wish you well,” Dr. Levin said, and he handed her a sealed envelope.
“A small check. For the éclaireurs. I know that you need funds,” he said, and she smiled her gratitude.
She and Anna left the office, Anna visibly upset. She gripped Madeleine’s hand too tightly, and tears glinted in her blue eyes.
“I heard what the doctor said,” the child whispered. “But promise me that I will be safe. Promise me that you will protect me, Mademoiselle Madeleine.”
“Of course I will. You are my petite soeur. Come, let us have an ice cream. June will soon be here, and that is the month of your birthday so we must celebrate.” She forced herself to smile.
“Yes. In June I will be ten years old,” the child said importantly.
“Then let us pretend that today is your birthday,” Madeleine teased.
It was wise, she thought sadly, to push all celebrations forward. They were in a race against history. Every moment of joy was a goalpost successfully passed.
“And when is your birthday?” Anna asked as they sat in a café eating generous servings of chocolate glacé.
“The eighteenth of November. I am a child of winter,” Madeleine replied.
She did not add that she had been born exactly a week after the celebration of the armistice that had ended the Great War. There was a family picture of the Dreyfus men still in uniform, gathered about her bassinet, each of them raising a glass in celebration.
“What were they toasting?” she had asked her mother once.
“Peace, of course. The end of the war to end all wars,” Jeanne Dreyfus Levy had replied, and Madeleine had never forgotten those words, uttered with such optimism.
It was ironic, the thought that a scarce twenty-two years later, the German army hovered on the French border. The war to end all wars had instead birthed an even more dangerous conflagration.
“Perhaps we should celebrate your birthday early,” Anna said happily.
“Yes, perhaps we should,” Madeleine agreed. “But it might not be necessary.”
November, after all, was many months away, and spring was the season of hope.
Six
André, her young flower-vendor friend, chased after Madeleine as she hurried home after a workday that had begun too early and extended into the early evening. But that, she knew, would be the pattern of her days, given the grimness of current events. Germany had turned hopeful spring into a season of despair.
She smiled at the boy who always reminded her of happier days.
“I saved my best lilacs for you,” he shouted.
She broke her stride and examined the flowers in his panniers.
“How kind of you, André. Of course. The lilacs of June. Even this June.”
Staring up at the cobalt-blue sky, she shivered against the impact of the harsh, unseasonable wind that had assaulted Parisians throughout the past week. The unpleasant weather, she thought, was an apt accompaniment to the sad news from Dunkirk and the terror that had gripped the city since the advent of the first horrific German bombing raid. War, unofficial undeclared war—decried as faux, false, by the government, but recognized as all too real by the vulnerable civilian population—had come to Paris. Lives had been lost; hospitals struggled to cope with the wounded. Madeleine’s father and Jean Louis kept the doors of their clinic open throughout the night. And yet, despite the turmoil and the destruction, the tenacious lilacs continued to bloom. She envied the lovely blossoms.
“Such brave and foolish flowers,” she whispered as she buried her face in the bouquets André had thrust at her and inhaled their fragrance.
“You must hurry home, André. You know that Prime Minister Reynaud has asked everyone to go indoors before darkness falls,” she instructed the boy.
The prime minister’s curfew, she knew, was a wise and necessary precaution. The Nazis, those creatures of darkness, waited for nightfall to launch their murderous raids on a city in love with light.
“I am not afraid of those stupid Boches,” André announced scornfully as he wrapped her flowers in damp pages of Le Monde.
“Of course you’re not. But you don’t want your mother to worry.”
She handed him three franc notes and watched him sprint through the gathering darkness, pausing to hand his only remaining bouquet to a beggar woman who clutched it to her breast.
She decided that despite the curfew, she would visit her grandmother that evening. Lucie Dreyfus lov
ed lilacs, and Madeleine longed to see her smile.
She was surprised then, that when she arrived home, it was her grandmother who opened the door and motioned her to enter quickly. Her surprise turned to concern at the sight of her entire family assembled, an unusual gathering on a weekday evening. Simone, pale and sad-eyed, looked up from the labels she was writing, and Madeleine, bending to embrace her sister, read them with a sinking heart. Cooking Utensils. Linens. Books. It was a family custom to label the cartons of possessions they transported to their holiday homes, but she knew of no plans for a holiday. What was Simone doing? What was happening?
Even her uncle Pierre and his family, who would soon leave for the United States, were seated at the dining room table, removing one document after another from a file box, reading each carefully and consigning them to separate stacks.
Her brothers, Etienne and Jean Louis, stood before the bookshelves that lined the wall of the salon, methodically removing volumes, placing some in open cartons and discarding others.
“Only medical books,” her father called. “We will transport only medical books.”
“And anything by Zola and those about l’affaire,” her mother added.
Lucie Dreyfus nodded her agreement.
“Of course. We do not want to leave our family’s history behind.”
Madeleine stared at her grandmother, who deftly razored open the hem of a long skirt and passed it to Pierre’s wife, Marie. Her aunt then folded currency and jewelry into the open seam and stitched it closed. Madeleine remembered Frau Hofberg telling her that she had done just that before the family’s hasty departure from Berlin. Perhaps such skill at hiding gems and money was embedded in the collective memories of Jewish women, she thought, a genetic heritage assuring survival.
“What has happened?” she asked, her voice trembling. “Why are you doing all this?”
She tightened her grip on the bouquets of lilacs, suddenly dizzied by their scent and the unexpected chaos that pervaded her usually orderly home.
All had been calm when she departed for work that morning. Yes, there had been sadness because of the air battle over France, but her father had insisted that the English would send additional squadrons. German troops were indeed advancing on Rouen, but Rouen was at a distance from Paris. They had offered each other reassurances and breakfasted in calm, their baguettes warm and slathered with butter, second cups of café au lait generously poured. Madeleine wondered what had occurred in the intervening hours to precipitate this burst of frenzied activity, the dismantling of their home, the concealment of their valuables.
It was her father who paused in his examination of papers passed to him by Pierre to answer her.
“The French army requisitioned our apartment this afternoon,” he said gravely. “Our soldiers are being evacuated from Le Havre and Cherbourg. The army is being driven back across the Seine. The officer who came to order the requisition informed me that our apartment will be used as a planning base for operations in defense of Paris and advised us to leave the city at once. We are doing just that, of course. We will move south, to my family in Toulouse. We will be safer there, and hopefully, our family will not be separated.”
Madeleine nodded. “Of course. I understand,” she murmured.
La famille, unified and together, had always been their mutual priority. It was a Dreyfus coda.
“Will you be able to come with us, Madeleine? Can you arrange a leave of absence from your work?” Lucie Dreyfus asked anxiously.
“Yes. I will inform my superiors at once,” she said.
Her reply was instinctive. Her first obligation was to her family, to her parents, her brothers, and Simone, with whom she had shared every day of her life. The Bureau of Assistance Sociale would manage without her for a short while.
But the interruption of her work with the Jewish Scouts was of greater concern to her. It had been decided that if the German army occupied Paris, the scouts would begin to activate plans to smuggle their youngest charges, most of them the undocumented children of refugees, across the border to safety in Switzerland or Spain. Her own small cadre of such children included Anna Hofberg.
Madeleine had trained them for what was certain to be an arduous and hazardous pilgrimage to safety. They were accomplished stealth marchers, aware of every subterfuge, accomplished students of Catholicism able to recite the Hail Mary and to deny their Jewishness if necessary. They had been drilled and drilled again in the techniques of survival. Each of them had a set of underclothing that concealed cloth wallets wrapped in waterproof covering, containing the identity cards Simone had forged with consummate skill. Compasses and maps were hidden where they could be redeemed only by a select group of leaders. Madeleine and her comrades had placed their hands upon their hearts in a secret meeting and pledged an oath of allegiance. The words were etched into her memory.
“I pledge to fight on until the total collapse of Nazi Germany. For honor, liberty, and the right to a Jewish life.”
Claude’s voice had melded with her own as they repeated the words, a duet of commitment and loyalty, binding them ever closer. Claude and Madeleine, comrades and friends. She dared not think beyond those two words. Camarade. Ami. All beyond that was in abeyance.
It was Claude, she knew, who would take her place if her small group of children were endangered in her absence. Struggling for calm, she assured herself that she would not be away from Paris for any length of time. She would accompany her family, help them to establish a safe haven in the south, and return to the capital as soon as possible. But still, in her mind’s eye, she saw Anna Hofberg’s narrow face, pale with fright, and remembered her promise to the child.
“I will always protect you,” she had said.
It was a promise she would try, with all her might, to keep.
Simone handed her a pen and a sheet of notepaper.
“Write to Claude,” she said softly.
But even as Madeleine lifted the pen, there was a knock at the door and Claude strode into the room. His chestnut-colored hair tumbled from his student cap in a mass of damp curls, and his avian face glistened with sweat. She understood that he must have run through the deserted streets of the city, never looking up at a sky dark with danger.
“I just heard that your apartment has been requisitioned, and I came as quickly as I could. I was afraid you might have already left,” he gasped.
“I would not have left without contacting you,” she said. “You must know that.”
“Of course I do. You must not worry. I will take care of your troop of children until you return,” he said.
He did not ask when that would be. He understood that she had no reply to offer him. All plans for the future had been wrested from their grasp.
“Claude, please tell Anna that I will see her very soon, that I will buy her a birthday present in Toulouse.”
A foolish promise, she knew. Would there be toys for sale in a city bracing itself for war? Still, she would find something, anything. She did not want Anna to fear that she was being abandoned.
“I will do that, of course,” Claude said. “Her brothers are in my troop. I will see them tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Madeleine repeated and wondered where she herself would be when the next day dawned.
Claude remained, assisting her family with the packing. Later that evening, he accompanied Lucie Dreyfus back to her apartment on rue des Renaudes and helped her fill cartons with whatever staples remained in her pantry.
“There will be very little food on the road to the south,” he said. “So many Parisians are fleeing Paris, fearful because Reynaud has moved the city government to the Loire Valley. It will be very difficult to find food and shelter on the way to Toulouse.”
“I know that, Claude,” Lucie Dreyfus replied calmly. “This is not the first difficulty I have encountered in my life.”
She spoke with a calm born of her long familiarity with danger and difficulty. She would confront and survive the Nazi threat, horrific and evil as it was, even as she had confronted and survived the horrific and evil attacks on her husband and her family all those years ago.
Methodically, she selected whatever she thought might be useful during the difficult days ahead. She and Claude ripped bed linens into strips.
“We may need them for bandages,” she explained.
She wadded her jewels in newsprint and concealed them in containers of flour and sugar. She handed him a large diamond ring.
“Sell it,” she instructed. “You will need the money for the children.”
He understood then that she knew of the dangerous rescue program in which he and Madeleine were involved. He marveled that she had not argued against it, given how fiercely protective she was of her family, but then, of course, she was a woman conditioned to courage. He took the ring without protest.
“And please,” she added, “take very good care of my Madeleine.”
“Always,” he said. “Ever and always.”
His friend Marcel arrived, driving a battered Citroën, and the two young men carried the cartons to the car. Lucie turned briefly and stared up at the window of her abandoned dining room. She had left a small lamp burning, and she smiled at the golden light that glowed so gently in the elegant room where her family had spent so many happy hours. She was comforted. The room was unimportant. She had her memories. She had her family.
The Paris Children : A Novel (2020) Page 6