The Paris Children : A Novel (2020)

by Goldreich, Gloria

  Pierre Dreyfus did not wish her au revoir.

  “Adieu,” he murmured. “Go with God. May He bless you.”

  He repeated the words in Hebrew.

  “HaShem y’vorach otach.”

  Standing together on the pier, the sea-scented wind brushing their faces, uncle and niece wept.

  “Shalom,” she whispered.

  She saw his lips move in answer, but his words were lost to her as the ship’s horn blared its harsh final warning.

  Twelve

  Simone was already in Toulouse when Madeleine and Lucie returned. Together, the sisters helped the family move into a flat obtained by the distribution of a profusion of bribes. It was very small and on the fourth floor of a building without an elevator, but it was on the rue de la Dalbade, and the elderly concierge, Madame Leonie, was known to be sympathetic to the Résistance. Jeanne was relieved that there was a large storage unit adjacent to the bedroom.

  “I can store the clothing that I collect for needy children there,” she said and at once thrust a carton of donated sweaters into the empty space. Such garments would be needed when small trekkers followed escape trails across the snow-topped mountains. Hypothermia was as lethal as the Mausers of the Nazi troops.

  The flat was, they all agreed, ideally located. Because of its proximity to the eastern bank of the Garonne, Dr. Levy and Jean Claude could walk to their clinic, Etienne to his school, and Jeanne to the market and the boutiques that bought her elegant embroidery. Her needlework was an important source of income for the family. Their resources had been sadly depleted by the Vichy government, which had decreed that French Jews were mandated to pay a fine of one billion francs as a punishment for attacks on German soldiers in the north. The full amount was to be raised by the Jewish Council. Failure to pay would be punished by public hangings. The Jewish Council, fearful of draconian reprisals, had moved swiftly.

  Twenty thousand francs from the Paris bank account of “the widow Madame Lucie Dreyfus” and a similar amount from the account of “the Jewish doctor Pierre Paul Levy,” is forfeit, their edict read.

  “It seems that our family name is well remembered by both the Jewish Council and the Vichy traitors,” Lucie averred with a sadness she did not mask.

  “Still, there are many who stand with us,” Madeleine countered reassuringly.

  She comforted herself with the knowledge that members of the Résistance and Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces in London supported the Jewish Scouts. She did not speak to her grandmother of the Vichy spies who haunted the markets and cafés, treacherously scavenging scraps of information which they offered for sale. She knew that the slightest changes in routine were entered into dossiers. The family conspired to protect Lucie from all anxiety.

  They agreed that given her age, Lucie would have difficulty climbing the stairwell to the new apartment, so Madeleine found a room for her grandmother with central heating in a boarding house near the Church of Saint Etienne.

  “I want you to be warm, Grand-mère,” she said. “Warm and safe.”

  “Ah, Madeleine. You worry about everyone. Please take some time to worry about yourself.”

  “I will be fine, Grand-mère,” she said, the reassuring lie falling too easily from her lips.

  She dared not speak of how often she seethed with resentment because her own needs were so subverted by her responsibilities to others. This was not the time to worry about herself. But would such a time ever come? Would she ever have the ease to think only of Madeleine Levy? Madeleine Levy and Claude Lehmann. She took an odd clandestine pleasure from the mental coupling of their names as she hurried back to the rue de la Dalbade.

  An autobus to Paris was due to leave within the hour. Simone and Madeleine embraced their parents, and Jean Louis and Etienne carried their bags to the bus station.

  “Take care, Madeleine, Simone,” Jean Claude said.

  “We love you.”

  Etienne’s voice was very faint, but Madeleine pressed her fingers to his lips and felt his caring words tender upon each trembling digit.

  * * *

  The sisters shivered under the winds of danger throughout the long journey north. The forged papers Simone had prepared were within easy reach in their portmanteaus, and they had committed every detail of their false identities to memory. It was a necessary precaution because an ordinance issued by the German Occupation Authority had closed the entire northern sector of the country to Jews. The bus was stopped at every Gestapo checkpoint, papers were given cursory glances, and the passengers endured the searing glances of officers who stomped through the vehicle. Madeleine feigned sleep and Simone did not lift her eyes from the open book on her lap during such searches. But at Bourges, three members of the Feldgendamerie, the military police, boarded, brandishing their batons and shouting at the frightened passengers.

  “Documents! Cartes d’identité!” they demanded, pushing their way from one row of seats to another, indifferent to pleading mothers and crying children. Two families were ordered off the bus, and through the grime-encrusted windows, Madeleine and Simone saw them herded into a waiting truck, the mothers holding the hands of their terrified children, the fathers tight-lipped and pale, their shoulders hunched in the shame peculiar to men who were powerless to protect their families.

  Tentacles of fear tightened around Madeleine’s heart as the soldiers approached their seats. Her breath came with difficulty, but Simone very calmly shifted in her seat and handed her a small pouch crammed with cosmetics.

  She understood. As Simone had done only seconds earlier, she combed her hair, applied rouge to her cheeks, and outlined her lips in heavy red lipstick. Holding a miniature mirror, she studied her newly made-up face. Never vain, for the very first time, she rejoiced in the power of her own beauty. She practiced a smile and slipped surprising easily into her new identity.

  She was no longer Madeleine Levy. She was Adele Valheur, a chambermaid at a pensione in Neuilly. The story she and Simone had contrived was a simple one, and she told it well as she handed her papers to an officer so young that acne sprouted on his very pink cheeks.

  She explained that she and her friend Emilia, asleep beside her, who unhappily was a mute, were returning to work after a brief holiday in the south. They had been the guests of some very important Gestapo officers. She giggled. She had promised not to reveal their names, but if pressed she might do so.

  “Non. Non.” The young officer declined the offer as he scanned her work permit.

  “Read the address of my employer carefully,” she said. “Remember it. Come visit me some evening. Ask for Adele. I will know how to please you.”

  She moved forward and thrust her face close to his so that she could see his lips and be certain of his reply, certain that she and Simone, whom he had studiously ignored, were out of danger.

  He nodded and replied in slow, coarse French.

  “Perhaps I will do that, Fraulein Adele.”

  He smiled lasciviously and handed the documents back to her.

  “You must get a new photograph. The one on your work permit does not do you justice.”

  “I will try. But all the good photographers have left Paris.”

  “Only the Jewish ones. But German photographers will soon arrive and take over their studios. Be patient. Perhaps I will accompany you to have a new photograph taken. There are many poses I could suggest.”

  He grinned, his teeth glistening with saliva, yellow pus oozing from the pimples on his too-pink cheek.

  “That would be most pleasant,” she said, struggling against the bilious nausea that soured her throat. She batted her eyelashes and returned the documents to her purse.

  “I will not disturb your friend’s sleep,” he said.

  “How kind you are.”

  She retained her false smile as he moved on, harshly interrogating an elderly couple whose p
apers fortunately were in order.

  It was only when the bus was on its way that she leaned back, exhausted and depleted.

  Simone smiled at her.

  “You are becoming an excellent actress, Madeleine,” she said. “But the quality of that photo might have betrayed us. I must learn how to doctor those Photomaton copies so they look more authentic. I hope this Adolfo Kaminsky who is said to be a master forger can teach me to do that.”

  “I hope so too,” Madeleine replied vaguely, still dizzied by the fear she had struggled to suppress during that brief and dangerous encounter. Cold sweat coated her body, but clutching Simone’s hand, she willed herself to calm. Somehow she had dissimulated, and somehow she had survived. She marveled at the role she had played so well, marveled that her fake sensual smile had fooled that stupid feldgendarme, marveled that she had heard him so clearly. How disappointed he would be when he discovered that there was no Pensione Royale on the rue des Rois in Neuilly. In fact, there was no rue des Rois. Newly revived, she stared out the window and watched a caravan of German lorries lumber clumsily down the narrow roadway.

  The sisters separated when they arrived in Paris, arranging to meet that night at the small hotel in the rue Jacob where they had arranged to share a room. Simone hurried to the Left Bank where Adolfo Kaminsky, the expert Résistance forger, was conducting a workshop, while Madeleine went to meet Claude at the office of the éclaireurs.

  The new scout headquarters was above a café on the rue des Grands Augustin favored by the painter Pablo Picasso. It was said that when a contingent of Germans entered the café, the painter bellowed a demand for crème caramel, an agreed-upon warning to the scouts on the upper floor to cease all movement and conversation.

  Claude was overjoyed to see her, but he was more angered than amused when Madeleine told him about her interrogation on the bus.

  “What if he had realized that your papers were forged? You might have been arrested and sent to Drancy. Why did you place yourself in such danger?”

  “What else could I have done?” she asked, her eyes flashing, her anger matching his own.

  She understood that his fury masked his concern. She knew that there was no need to remind him that danger was now their constant companion, that every step they took, every word they spoke had to be vested with caution. Because they were Jews. Only because they were Jews. It was irrational, absurd, an absurdity and an irrationality that she and Claude acknowledged, even as they recognized the danger it imposed.

  The brief anger between them subsided as swiftly as it had been ignited. She took his hand and pressed it to her cheek in a gesture of forgiveness. He had been right to speak of danger, and she had not been wrong to react with ire.

  “Vichy spies are everywhere,” he said softly. “They haunt the cafés, eavesdropping in the hopes of gleaning any scrap of Résistance information. We must be very careful.”

  “I am always careful,” Madeleine assured him. “But is there any reason to be particularly fearful now?”

  “There is,” he replied. “We have been asked to undertake a difficult and important mission. You and I. Are you ready?”

  Her heart beat faster. Her breath came in uneven gasps. She closed her eyes and struggled for calm. But when she spoke, her voice was steady.

  “If we are to be together, Claude, then I am ready,” she replied and leaned back, surrendering at last to the exhaustion that had haunted her throughout the long and danger-darkened day.

  “We will be together,” he replied. “That is all I can say now. We must wait for instructions.”

  She nodded. She asked no questions. He offered no answers. A voice sounded through the silence between them.

  “Crème caramel!” the artist shouted, his Spanish accent immediately recognizable.

  They waited. Claude peered through the window and watched the German soldiers stride across the road. They sat motionless until the bald artist leaned back in his chair and lifted his sketch pad, an agreed-upon signal that the danger had passed.

  Hand in hand, they left the éclaireurs office and walked through the fading twilight radiance. At the rue Jacob, Simone waited for them in the hotel’s small garden café, her face lifted to the slowly gathering darkness. They followed her gaze. A single star had appeared, and they did not look at each other as their separate wishes floated skyward.

  Thirteen

  The next morning, the sisters left the hotel and walked swiftly toward the boulevard adjacent to the rue Jacob. Passersby glanced at them, moved by their grace and beauty. Simone, slight and fair, looked wonderfully cool in a light-blue, wide-sleeved cotton summer dress that swirled about her knees. Madeleine, dark-haired and strong-featured, wore a rose-colored linen sheath that accentuated her high color. They both wore broad-brimmed straw hats that protected them against the harsh sun that streamed across the unshaded cobblestoned street. They smiled, their pace unhurried, their faces turned to each other as they chatted happily. They were adhering to their grandmother’s tutelage. Lucie had often said that cheerful, well-dressed young women never aroused suspicion. They paused at a busy corner and waited patiently for traffic to ease, hoping that Lucie’s advice was vested with validity.

  They flashed flirtatious smiles at the gendarmes who stood guard at the Metro station and hurried to catch the train that carried them to the Left Bank. Simone had insisted that Madeleine accompany her to the workshop Adolfo Kaminsky was conducting, and Claude had thought it an excellent idea.

  “Forgery is a convenient talent,” he had said and Madeleine, although protesting her ineptness, had agreed. Any small scrap of knowledge might prove to be ammunition in the terrible and unconventional war they were fighting. She wondered if it would be of any use for the mysterious assignment they were to undertake but knew that it would be dangerous to speak of it. Simone’s ignorance was protection in these strange and treacherous times.

  Exiting the Metro, she and Simone wandered from street to street, assuming the role of tourists, gazing into shop windows and sipping coffee at a small café, until they were certain that they were not being followed. At last, they entered an apartment building surrounded by scaffolding. Following Simone up the debris-strewn stairwell, Madeleine was overcome with nausea, assaulted by an overpowering stench that grew stronger with each ascendant step. She paused and gagged.

  “The odor is from the chemicals that Kaminsky, our master forger, uses,” Simone explained. “He operates a laboratory here. Acids. Powders. Compounds. Forgery can be very complicated. And, unfortunately, very noxious.”

  “How do the other tenants stand the stench?” Madeleine asked.

  Simone shrugged.

  “They think he’s a painter and the smells come from his tubes of oils. They assume that all his visitors are artists. In Paris, artists are routinely forgiven. And, of course, in occupied Paris, no one asks too many questions.”

  They entered the room where two young men and a woman huddled over a Bunsen burner as a dark-haired youth explained the elements of a compound to them. The young instructor was slight of build, a teenager who spoke with both authority and dedication in an accent Madeleine had difficulty identifying.

  She flashed a questioning look at Simone.

  “Yes. That is Adolfo Kaminsky, our guru forger. He is an Argentinian,” Simone explained in a whisper. “His parents are Russian Jews who left France for South America and then returned when he was a small boy. The family was so poor that even though Adolfo was just a child, he found work, first doing odd jobs at a dairy and then at a dry cleaners where he managed to learn a lot of chemistry. He bought secondhand chemistry textbooks and studied them, experimenting on all kinds of stains, analyzing inks. When the Germans invaded Paris, he and his parents were arrested by the Germans and sent to Drancy.”

  “Drancy.”

  Madeleine shivered at the very mention of the dreaded transit camp from wh
ich Jews were inevitably deported to Auschwitz. She had known Drancy in another life, her now-so-distant childhood. On a long-ago sunny afternoon, Alfred Dreyfus had taken her on a surprise outing to a suburb then under construction called Drancy, conceived as a self-contained community with every social amenity It was ironic that such an idealistic undertaking was now the dreaded internment camp.

  “But I thought that Drancy was a place of no return,” she said. “How did the Kaminskys manage to free themselves?”

  “They were released because they had Argentinian passports. That is when Adolfo realized the importance of documents and how his knowledge of chemistry could help the Résistance by perfecting our forgeries. He has been working with us ever since. There is so much I can learn from him,” Simone continued as she shrugged into a stained smock and joined the group huddled around the young Argentinian at the makeshift laboratory table. Madeleine followed her.

  They watched as he poured the contents of a test tube into a jar. They observed how its tint was slowly altered. One by one, each observer repeated the same process.

  Madeleine hesitated briefly and then imitated her sister. She did not have Simone’s talent for calligraphy, but she might yet learn something. Overcoming her revulsion at the odors that permeated the narrow room, she observed closely and took careful notes in her moleskin notebook.

  She studied the array of items ranged on every surface—quill pens, pots of ink, rubber stamps, reams of paper of all sizes, unstopped jars of noxious chemicals. She watched as used passports were skillfully altered, their cases stressed. Lactic acid erased blue ink. Rubber stamps were scraped and pierced with the tines of a fork, then pressed onto pads of ink that had been blanched so that their imprints on documents were faded to an impressive authenticity.

  Adolfo Kaminsky described what he called “the magic of color” and demonstrated how dyes could be altered with the use of different compounds.

  “I learned about lactic acid when I worked in the dairy,” he said. “When a bride asked my dry-cleaner boss to remove a blue ink stain from her wedding dress, I told him to soak the dress in milk. It worked on the wedding dress, and now it works on ration cards and exit visas.”