‘Martin, I loved your father with every part of me. In spirit, if not in the flesh, you are mine. Please don’t tell them I’m not your mother. It’s our little secret, n’est-ce pas? Just you and me.’
Impulse is a terrible thing, but he knew he had this hold over her, and in the dust of that window near the handprint, he deftly drew his little parachute and silently said, That’s me, isn’t it, Angélique? I’ve been dropped from the sky by parachute. That’s how I got here.
Angrily she hissed, ‘If you feel anything for me, you will erase that immediately!’
It was a nice little parachute but was not of white silk, thought Martin. No, this one—his—was of dark blue, almost black silk but with silver stars and clouds and shooting stars and a big yellow moon. And as he had sailed down from the skies above at night, he had guided his parachute by pulling on the lines and letting the air either fill a part of it or spill out.
‘Martin, please! It’s too dangerous.’ How could he do this to her? If she erased it, he would only draw another. The Sturmbannführer could well ask him to write his name. Martin had both pencil and paper for this purpose and would do so and then, as so often, out of perversity, would add his little parachute, his special sign, and with himself dangling from the straps. It was his way of explaining why he wasn’t home in England with his mother but was here in France with his father’s lover.
But of course the Germans wouldn’t know it was Martin hanging from those straps. They’d think it was someone else entirely, a clandestine wireless operator from England, sent to help the Résistance.
‘Martin, I can’t undo what I’ve done to your mother and her marriage but if you leave that there, they will kill me and what will God say to you when you have to answer at Judgement’s door?’
She always used this threat when things weren’t going well. She had even got old Father Benoît, the village priest, to force him to write down his answers and pass them under the grille during confessional so that God would know the truth and that Father Benoît would at least think he did.
She prodded him sharply. He held back. He wanted to shout at her, I DIDN’T WANT TO COME TO PARIS, DID I? IT WAS ALL YOUR IDEA. YOU WERE FEELING GUILTY ABOUT HIDING ME AWAY LIKE THAT. YOU HAD FINALLY DECIDED YOU HAD BETTER DO SOMETHING!
Lights down his throat, the secrets of his voice box revealed to the prying eyes of some “specialist”. The throat would have to be sliced open, an operation with ether, much ether poured onto a pad of surgical cotton and clamped over the nose and mouth, the struggles, the panic, the need to breathe … Giselle and André and all his other “cousins” at the farm had said that the specialist would have to install a mechanical talking box with a key to wind it up. There’d be a hole in his throat. A hole! The specialist would have to make a little wooden door for it. A door!
The scream from down the corridor began on a broken note but it caught in the air and it made the heat vibrate. It brought the beads of sweat out on her brow and face, her underarms as Angélique stiffened in panic until she felt as if she was drowning in sweat and cried, ‘Martin, please!’
The sweat was like ice on her burning skin. It made her shiver uncontrollably. It made her urinate—‘Ah non!’ she wept but nothing could stop the flood that now filled her shoes and left its evidence on the floor.
Martin smelled its sourness but only as in memory of the road that day, for the scream was like others he had heard then. Unbidden the images came rushing at him: the flashes, the roaring, the hammering of bullets, the smashing of glass and metal, the cries, the shrieks, the screams, the stench of his pee …
The Messerschmitts had come back. They had timed it perfectly. Everyone who had been left alive had returned to crowd about on the road. This time a man’s head exploded in a shower of blood and brains. His eyes flew apart. A little girl’s back was torn to pieces. Her mother couldn’t reach her. The father had tried to save her mother and the baby by lying on top of them. There hadn’t been room for the girl, but the cannon shells had had no mercy and had found them, too, and gone right through the father to explode underneath, ripping the baby from its mother’s breast.
Again there was silence after the Messerschmitts had left. Again, after a long, long time, people began to pick themselves up.
When Angélique found him, Martin flung himself against her and buried his face in her dress, the sour stench of urine then, and now too, of his own and hers.
Kraus saw the two of them clinging to each other next to the windows. They were caught against the light, the heat and the flies. A woman of thirty-six; a boy of ten she claimed was her son. A reddish-brown-haired, green-eyed, fair-skinned, freckled boy with big, troll-like ears and teeth that were too big for the rest of his face.
‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’ And when she had, Kraus noticed everything about her including the dampness of her shoes and white ankle socks. ‘Your name?’ he asked.
Had Martin erased the parachute? ‘Angélique Bellecour.’
‘Age?’
‘Thirty-six.’ He had better have.
‘Date of birth?’
‘8 May 1907.’
‘Parents?’
Martin let them talk. He turned away to watch the flies. One of them was crawling over his little parachute. Had it been later on that same day in June of 1940 that he had seen a British pilot bail out of his two-winged fighter only to have his parachute burst into flames?
It must have been. That’s why he had made his out of asbestos cloth, but with the dark blue silk and the stars and moon on either side so that it would be invisible too, against the night sky.
He had come down in a field in France and in darkness and now here he was, three years later, in Paris with her. Friday, 27 August 1943. Fridays were never her best days. There had been no sign of his father after the Messerschmitts had come back. ‘He’s gone,’ she had said. ‘He had to leave us, Martin. He had to get away while he could.’ But had she lied to him, and to herself?
‘Where was the boy born?’ asked Kraus.
‘Near Tours, at Saint-Étienne-de-Chigny. There’s a convent. My parents didn’t want others to know I was giving birth to an illegitimate child. As soon as we could, I went to live and work in Orléans. I wanted to finish my studies but it was impossible. As it was, I had just enough money left over each week to pay a woman to look after the child while I was at work.’
‘Her name?’
‘Madame Marie-Léon Jeannôt.’
‘Address?’
‘Look, it was a long time ago. She’ll have moved. She wasn’t young. She was an old woman.’
‘There’s no need to get angry. Address?’
Ah, merde alors! ‘72 rue de la Bretonnerie, apartment 10. She was on the floor below mine. It was really very convenient. Possibly the best situation I’ve managed.’
‘That’s near the Palais de Justice.’
‘Ah oui, bien sûr.’ Did he already know that she had lived there once, alone and childless? ‘Look, I really must get the boy to the specialist. Appointments like that are very hard to arrange.’
‘How long were you in Orléans?’
It would go on and on. ‘Two years. Martin was just learning to walk when I answered an advertisement for Aix-en-Provence. We went there for his health and mine. The chest. Neither of us are very good in the cold, damp weather. Last winter’s flu was terrible.’
She had said it and he had let her do so knowing that every word would have to be repeated exactly as she had first given them. Time and again they would demand these answers.
‘Aix,’ he said.
‘Yes. A notary.’
She tried to find the will to smile at the memory but failed and said with a shrug, ‘Actually a widower who was looking for a wife and housekeeper as well as a secretary. It didn’t work out. I was doing all the work and he was doing all the complaining.’
‘And then?’ he asked.
He didn’t bother to grin at her little joke or to ask the notary’s name and address. He would come back to those later. Angélique knew he would. Again she worried about the little parachute. Was it still there on the window?
‘And then?’ he reminded her.
‘Nice in the spring of ’35, an export-import firm. A good job but they went bust. Toulon in the fall—we stayed there for nearly three years. It was good, too, but not as good as Orléans.’
Kraus waited. He’d give her all the time she needed to betray herself.
‘Then Reims in December of ’38 and … and Lille in ’39, the spring.’
Lille was quite near the Belgian border. Almost imperceptibly Kraus nodded. He didn’t look up from the pencil he held by both ends. ‘And the boy’s father, did he follow you around the country?’
Like a lost dog—was this implied? ‘Every once in a while he’d turn up and for the boy’s sake, I’d let him stay.’
‘But you don’t know where he is now?’
‘Not since the Blitzkrieg.’
‘I think you’re lying.’
‘I’m not. Please check. Everything I’ve said is true.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘Look, why not telephone the Hauptmann Scheel at the Kommandantur in Abbeville? He’ll tell you who I am, or if you prefer, talk directly to the Oberst Lautenschläger. Both are very pleased with my work and will vouch for my loyalty. I’m simply an honest, hardworking secretary with a son who ought to be able to talk but can’t seem to bring himself to do so. Everyone is concerned. They all want Martin to get better.’
Bois Carré fell under Lautenschläger’s jurisdiction, a plodding Prussian of the old school who would soon be no longer in control of security because the SS were going to take over. Had she seen plans of the site? Had they been lying around in the colonel’s office? Had she told that bastard down the hall about them? Was that why Doumier had taken such an interest in the woods?
‘Major, please. I beg you. We’re going to miss our appointment. If the specialist thinks it necessary, an expert will be called in. A German. Someone from the Wehrmacht. The Oberst Lautenschläger says there are some really good doctors who deal with such things and that it can be arranged. I …’ She fiddled with her dress and tried to tidy up. ‘Ah! I must look a sight. Look, I have to find us a place to stay. We can’t wander the streets after curfew. I’ve promised the boy I’ll take him to the Louvre tomorrow. There’ll at least be some of the paintings, and I know lots of the sculptures have been returned to the galleries. This business here is all a mistake. We weren’t following anyone as their lookout. Ah, mon Dieu, Major. Those types, they … they wouldn’t trust us. A woman with a child is far too vulnerable. If you’ve children of your own, you’ll know all about that.’
‘Then why are you so afraid?’
Sacré nom de nom, but she mustn’t let it get to her. ‘Because when a person screams like that, Martin and me, we both know they are about to die. The road, remember? The Blitzkrieg? We were machine-gunned five times by the Messerschmitts, but grâce à Dieu, he can only remember the first two times.’
‘The Luftwaffe were just doing what was necessary.’
‘Bien sûr, the roads, they had to be cleared for the advancing tanks and motorized infantry. Even I can understand such a necessity.’
Could she lead them to her contacts? he wondered. Doumier and she would have been missed by now. At the first sign of trouble, their contacts would have gone into hiding.
Getting up, he gathered hers and the boy’s papers. Again he said, ‘Wait here,’ but this time he took the lift. She listened as it went down three floors, then shut her eyes. Suddenly exhausted, she tried to find a reason for their being detained, but of course such things, they could happen at any time. One never knew and seldom was the reason given.
The parachute, she said, a silent reminder. The parachute …
Martin was wandering about the room. Everything he saw, he studied with total concentration. What, really, was going through that head of his? Certainly he wasn’t stupid, as the teachers sometimes said, but very bright. He knew his French now—at least she had accomplished this. Night after night they had worked at it. Day after day in those first years she had found him in tears when she had got home from work. Ridiculed by the other children. Teased because he had no voice. Laughed at because he was a “bastard” child, pushed, punched, shoved, thrown to the ground and beaten.
Her son. They all thought of him as that. Her heart and his had been broken so many times but they could say nothing of the truth. Nothing. She had gone after every child who had ever teased him, had boxed their ears or chased them into the highest branches of the trees in the orchards just like a mother would have done, she to grab an ankle and try to pull the offender down, only to give up when common sense told her she’d best not break an arm or leg. The girls were no better.
‘Chéri, leave that bathtub alone. Come and sit with me.’
He had climbed into the thing, and when he came over to her, he opened his fist to show her what he’d found caught in the drain.
Ah merde, it was a gold wedding band. Long black hairs clung to it. A woman’s hairs. Sickened by the thought of what must have happened, she gripped her brow and tried to find a particle of sense in what was happening to them, tried to get a hold on herself. ‘I mustn’t cry,’ she said. ‘If I do, he’ll think I’m guilty and will then force me to tell him the truth.’
When Kraus came back, the boy was sitting on her lap, the woman calmed perhaps by the closeness of another human being. It would do no good to say, It’s all right. I’ve talked to Abbeville. Instead, he would simply tell her. ‘Follow me.’
Desperately Angélique wanted to cry out, Martin, did you erase that little parachute? But of course she couldn’t, nor could she look back towards that window.
Kraus had let her go, and she couldn’t believe their luck, felt wet and weak and all those things a prisoner must feel when death is at the door and somehow a reprieve has been granted.
As soon as she could, she stopped on the pavement to tidy Martin’s hair and shirt. ‘Chéri, you erased it, didn’t you?’
Her lips were quivering. Beneath the softness of her tan, the cheeks were pale and tight. Irritably she ran the back of a hand across her brow. ‘Well, don’t just keep me in suspense, eh? At least let my heart get back to where it belongs and my stomach creep up from my shoes or put my neck on the block for the bread-slicer.’*
He wrinkled his brow. He studied her. He wanted so much to punish her but knew she would only fall to pieces.
‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Don’t make me go down on my knees, Martin. If they see us standing around like this, they’ll think we’ve got all the time in the world. Try to find a little compassion for the woman who stole your father from your mother—yes, me, I freely admit it—but please remember that I love you dearly and that to make honey, the bee must always find nectar by coming to the flower. It takes two to make love, Martin. Never one.’
When he didn’t answer with a nod but gave her that blank look of his, a part of her died. Resolutely, she picked up the suitcases and started out. At five minutes to 4.00, they’d never make it anyway. The clinic was in the Luxembourg, halfway across a city she hadn’t lived in since the exodus of June 1940 when it had emptied itself of nearly 1,500,000 souls, and so much for all of the lies she had told Kraus, a worry to be sure, only the more so now. Everything in the city had changed. There were so few cars, there might just as well have been none. In 1939 there had been 350,000 of them; now there were 4,500. Vélo-taxis had replaced them. Round and round the Arc de Triomphe they went, these crazy rickshaw contraptions with ancient settees and armchairs behind, other things too. The halves of a bathtub placed side by side, a Renault sedan—a ’37, she thought—the motor and front half removed to
be replaced between the shafts by a tandem bicycle and its riders.
Young girls, old and middle-aged men, pulled these things, the girls in trousers and sweat-stained blouses that made their seats balloon and their bosoms appear to strain, the men in shabby suit jackets, open-collared shirts, no ties, and trousers that clung to their legs in the heat.
Ding, ding … German direction signs were everywhere and … ‘Hey, look where you’re going!’ Sweat was in the driver’s eyes. Four German corporals were guffawing, having the time of their lives with a girl of the streets. Bright-eyed and made-up, the girl laughed, they laughed. Others talked loudly, pointed, waved or sat woodenly in their uniforms as if they, too, could still not believe swastikas were draped beside what had been the eternal flame, lighted every night at ٦.٣٠ to burn throughout the darkness, it having had to be extinguished, of course, by the Boches, it having been a symbol of the war they had lost in ١٩١٨.
‘Martin, don’t dawdle. Stay close. Ah, never mind what they’ve done to our suitcases. They’re lighter, n’est-ce pas? Always look on the bright side, eh? After the rain, the sunshine.’ She tossed her head.
But was it sunshine or had he left that little parachute for them to find?
The SS had taken all of the food and she had thought, too, that her change of underwear would have vanished as well. Underwear was so hard to come by these days. One never hung one’s washing out even on the farm unless kept under guard and never overnight. Things simply disappeared and one went without. ‘You’ll learn,’ they had said and she had. Oh yes. She was always learning lessons.
‘We’ve got to find a café or bar,’ she said irritably. ‘I’ll have to telephone. Maybe the doctor will forgive us. He knows we’re coming. Delays are inevitable.’
Fat chance. Doctors were a law unto themselves. During the Blitzkrieg they had deserted en masse, leaving their hospitals and patients to fend for themselves. A national disgrace. Not all, of course. One or two had hung on but they were the exception.
The passage clouté’s lines of white iron studs were barely visible. Angélique started across, grabbing Martin by the wrist. All but reaching the centre of the thoroughfare that went round and round, she panicked and gasped, ‘Ah non,’ and heard the screech of brakes.
The Little Parachute Page 2