The Girl from Vichy

by Andie Newton

‘He left for Paris. Emergency assignment. Might be gone till the spring. He was very distraught at having missed you, but his train was leaving. He asked me to buy you flowers in his name.’ Papa pointed to a wilted bouquet of flowers on the far shelf.

  ‘He left?’ My mouth hung open for a second. ‘Not back until the spring?’ I didn’t expect this.

  Papa raised his eyebrows for his answer. Months had gone by keeping Papa in the dark about Gérard. I felt a push in my gut. Maybe it was the black paint on the wall across the street, or maybe I was just tired of living a lie. Either way, I felt compelled to be brutally frank, honest with him in a way I hadn’t been since I came home.

  ‘Papa, I’m sorry if this hurts, but Gérard’s not the man you think you betrothed me to all those months ago.’

  Papa seemed surprised by my statement, the cornflower blue in his eyes sparkling like icicles. ‘He’s a fine man. He’s a soldier—saved troops with his own hands—Battle of Sedan!’

  I shook my head. ‘First you said Gérard had saved a man, now whole troops? Papa, that French soldier you’re talking about died long ago.’

  ‘He’s prestigious. Secure.’

  ‘Now he’s just a man who’s doing bad things.’ My back got very straight and the words I had always wanted to say flew out of my mouth. ‘Collaborator! That’s what he is, Papa—arresting people left and right. He’ll beat a man for a promotion! How many children has he made orphans?’ I dug my palms into my eyes before pulling them away. ‘I’m glad he’s gone.’

  Papa looked up, pausing, mouth pinched. ‘He’ll be back.’

  We stared at each other across the table, his face similar to the way he looked at Mama just before they’d get into a fight, creased around the eyes.

  Angry shouts came from the street, and I broke away to look outside. ‘Jews,’ I heard someone say as I stood slowly from my chair. ‘Undesirables.’ Armoured lorries drove up to the train station, rattling the windows and shaking the trees, infecting the square with the roar of humming engines. Milice jumped out the back, guns drawn, surveying the roads.

  ‘What’s…’ I looked at Papa, only to turn back to the window. ‘What’s going on?’

  The lorry engines turned off, and I heard marching not that far away, getting closer, watching in horror as men and women walked trance-like past Papa’s window and into the train station under the drawn guns of the Milice, handing them over to the police who collected identification papers. Children clung to their parents, bundled in wool coats and scarves for a long journey. The men pleaded with the miliciens to let their families go, calling themselves Frenchman—an ominous word to go with the shuffling of their feet.

  Gestapo filed stiffly out of the train station, monitoring.

  ‘Papa,’ I said. ‘When are you going to believe?’ Sad, desperate faces pleaded for help from the other side. ‘The police,’ I said, looking at him over my shoulder, ‘anyone who works for the regime takes orders from the Reich. Always has, Papa.’

  He’d kept his head down. I threw my fists on his table and he jerked, wiping his eyes with a hanky from his pocket. ‘Don’t you hear that sound? Papa!’

  He scooted from his chair, and walked out of the room and into his office, softly closing the door behind him, leaving me to boil by myself.

  I looked at my pocketbook, and then my keys, grabbing them as I flew out the door.

  22

  I drove home in a fury, bursting through the front door, crying and sniffling at what I’d seen. Mama turned away from the sink. She stared at me for a second or two standing in the entryway, and then went back to her dish. ‘Mama,’ I said, and she snapped from her fog.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, and then wiped her hands on her apron, rushing over. ‘What is it? What happened?’

  ‘Something awful.’

  I told her about the Jews I saw walking past Papa’s wine bar. She didn’t seem surprised, nodding. I stopped short of telling her about Charlotte’s miscarriages, knowing Mama wouldn’t be able to handle such news.

  ‘Are you angry, or just sad?’ she asked. ‘I find I’m both most days.’

  I put my hands on the sink and looked out Mama’s kitchen window to the barrel cellar, which appeared to be locked up tight; no sign of Luc, and I needed him. ‘Right now, I’m angry.’ I let out a shrill little scream that scared the sparrows living in the eaves. ‘I don’t know who anybody is anymore.’

  I went downstairs into the root cellar and came back up with a tube of paint and a nice-sized brush. ‘What are you going to do with those?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Where will you go?’ Mama suddenly looked worried. ‘I don’t want you painting in open squares. There’re informants lurking around all over the city, now with the Milice handing things. The police are too dumb to think you’ll strike again so soon, but the informants…’

  ‘I need a better way to get the paint onto the brush,’ I said, remembering how careless I had been the other night dripping paint. ‘I need a palette.’

  ‘A palette?’ she almost laughed. ‘You can’t do that…’

  I eyed Mama’s apron sheers, and used them to snip the top off, making it one deep dish. ‘There,’ I said, tucking it into my inner jacket pocket. ‘Nobody can see.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Mama said.

  I thought for a moment. ‘The shopping district. I don’t want to be predictable, and you’re right about the open squares.’

  ‘Promise me you’ll tell me where you go every time you paint. I’m worried about you. Gérard, he’s a tyrant, but he’s also stupid. As strange as it sounds, I think the painting is more dangerous.’ She kissed my cheeks. ‘You’re all I have left.’

  ‘Mama,’ I started to say, ready to tell her about Gérard leaving for Paris, but she’d gone back to washing her dish in a fog. ‘I’ll be careful,’ I said.

  *

  The shopping district looked dark and forgotten in the dead of night, shaded windows facing each other from across the street. Metal doorknobs glinted, tucked and hidden in even darker doorways. I tightened the scarf over my hair. Watching, waiting, listening, pulling my coat tightly across my chest.

  I pulled the brush from the tube of paint.

  I thought about Charlotte’s scrunching face when she yelled at me—she’d never last in the Résistance, living with dirt on the hem of her dress, lying to keep her stories straight, taking pins in the shoulder and sprays of rosewater. Marking buildings in the night. Even if she did believe in our cause, the inconsistency of where and when to strike would throw her into a childlike fit; she was incapable of being spontaneous. I was my parents’ only daughter who could handle such a task.

  A swift breeze howled through the buildings, cracking through the trees, and I walked, scooting delicately down the pavement, another shadow in the night, holding the wet brush from a closed fist near my thigh. ‘For the Jews,’ I said, heart racing as I methodically, and ever so deliberately, flicked the brush over every one of the door’s handles, coating them in Charlotte’s red paint. ‘And for France.’

  A door burst open from down the way. ‘Who did this?’ A man yelled, and I ducked down, writing excitedly, heart bubbling, ‘Vichy Catchfly’ in cursive on the pavement before disappearing into the dark and motoring home.

  I arrived back at the chateau very late, headlamps rolling over the dead vineyard and Papa’s craggy vines, only to see Mama pulling her old bicycle up to the patio. She had her peignoir on as if she’d already been to bed and climbed back out of it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said, and she squinted into the headlamps.

  ‘Turn those off,’ she said, and I cut the engine, then the lights.

  ‘Mama,’ I said, walking up to her. ‘What are you doing out here? It’s late.’ She shivered, holding her peignoir closed in a cold breeze. ‘Where’s your coat?’

  Mama rested her bicycle on its kickstand and handed me the tyre pump. ‘You shouldn’t take the car as much,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think
about it until after I went to bed. You can use my bicycle. Or, walk. If someone recognizes Monsieur Morisset’s car…’

  I didn’t want to use her bicycle, but if it made her feel better, I would. I took the pump and fixed the flat tyre while she swiped at some cobwebs. ‘I won’t use the car as much,’ I said. ‘If it makes you feel better. Don’t worry. Ah, Mama, you should have seen it.’ My heart still bubbled, and I threw my hands up, looking into the stars.

  ‘It does make me feel better.’ She held her hair back and kissed my forehead. ‘And you can tell me all about it tomorrow,’ she said, and she walked through the screen door, leaving me to celebrate by myself on the patio.

  Luc would have loved it. I smiled.

  Mama slept in the next morning, and I left for Papa’s wine bar, buttoning up my coat for a long ride. I missed the car right away, and then even more so when I pedalled into a crowd waiting for a Milice parade to start, getting stuck behind two women. They chatted about jewellery, or so I thought with their talk of rubies and diamonds. I rang my bell, but they did not move. I rang it again, but now I was at a standstill and got off my bicycle.

  ‘Just like the Avenue des Champs-Élysées,’ one said to the other. ‘Rubies for the red tail lights and diamonds for the headlights. Oh, how I miss shopping in Paris!’

  ‘I will have to see it myself,’ the other said. ‘I bet it is striking.’

  Only after I heard them talk about the brightness of cadmium paint did I interrupt. ‘Hallo?’ I said. ‘Hallo, I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but what are you talking about?’ I straddled my bicycle in the crowd, waiting for them to tell me. One looked at me coldly.

  ‘The Catchfly,’ she said. ‘He’s struck again. This time taking a cue from Paris and the avenue of rubies and diamonds.’

  ‘He can’t be a man,’ the other woman said, sounding somewhat surprised her friend would think such a thing. ‘Les Femmes de la Nation is a woman’s cause.’

  ‘Only a man would be out at night roaming the streets,’ she said. ‘Besides, a shop owner saw him racing away in a car. A nice one.’

  ‘A car?’ I said, and I was very glad to have taken Mama’s bicycle that morning.

  They turned to each other, almost forgetting I was there and continued debating whether the Catchfly was a man or not.

  ‘What about the rubies and diamonds?’ I said.

  ‘There’s marks in the shopping district. He—’ her eyes shifted to her friend just briefly, who glared in return ‘—painted the doorknobs red. The whole road looks like the Avenue des Champs-Élysées with the knobs glinting red on one side and silver on the other.’

  ‘What?’ I was surprised the police hadn’t scraped it off yet with the noon hour approaching. ‘The police haven’t taken care of it?’

  She scoffed. ‘They’re private buildings, mademoiselle. The owners have to give their consent, and I’m sure they’ll take their time.’ Her face got very stiff before she whispered into the other lady’s ear about whose side she thought I was on. ‘Man, woman, does it matter?’

  The parade started. Shouts of standing at attention and walking with pride rolled down the street. And the Milice marched, holding their new flags side-by-side with the Vichy flag, rifles, and wearing berets. People looked on, stunned, quiet.

  ‘I think she’s a friend of the regime,’ the other said before they both fell away into the crowd, and I closed my eyes briefly, with the sun on my face, thinking of other days.

  The year the French Army left for the Maginot Line the entire city turned out to see them off, blowing kisses. Republic flags rolled out of windows and flapped delicately over our heads. Veterans from the 1914 war, dressed in their military best, stood at attention.

  I opened my eyes to see a Milice flag unfolding out a window above me, and the Milice marched on, and the crowd stayed quiet. A small contingent of German Wehrmacht trailed up the rear, stiffer than the Milice, watching, monitoring.

  *

  Days turned into weeks and soon enough spring had come, warming up the pavements and turning the trees green. I stood outside Papa’s wine bar, a grape-stained apron wrapped around my waist, listening to a fight break out in the street, two men arguing, followed by fists on flesh, one punching the other, calling his brother a traitor.

  Flower carts had rolled in, and people roused from their homes into the squares. A girl rushed past, yelling for her sister to hurry up before the flowers were gone, and the two men got off each other, each feeling their jaws where they’d been punched.

  I stepped away from the wall, watching a little closer. People grabbed flowers from baskets, wrapping them quickly in brown paper, something to conceal.

  I stopped the same girl on her way back from a flower cart, a bundle in her arms. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘The Catchfly,’ she said. ‘Everyone’s doing it.’ She peeled back the brown paper—French catchfly—an armful of the flowering weeds, bursting with red and pink petals. ‘It started a few hours ago; everyone’s throwing catchfly at the walls that have been painted. This morning’s Le Combat calls for it—every mark the Catchfly has made throughout the city.’

  My hand flew to my mouth, gaping with a smile, shuffling into the street, not caring a lick if anyone saw me, watching people throw catchfly at the wall, on the Morris Column where I’d written RAF days ago, and to every swipe of paint I’d left, remembering.

  The Vichy police ran out of the train station, sweeping the catchfly into piles, yelling at us all to get away, get back! But the square had already swelled with people, and the flower carts were as bare as any food cart in the city.

  Charlotte walked out of her boutique with a cling of her bell, and watched me in the street, her curly hair tucked behind her ears. A woman tried to sell her a single stem she’d pulled from her bushel. Charlotte glanced at her once before folding her arms and looking at me, her stare turning into a glare.

  We’d made a practice of avoiding each other since our fight, and I was surprised to see her outside, looking at me like she had something to say. I walked up to her, only to be stopped by the postmaster.

  ‘Adèle Ambeh!’ He flapped a letter in my face, barking my name. He set his heavy bag of parcels on the ground. ‘That’s you, no?’ He pushed the letter at me, postmarked from Paris. ‘Every week a letter comes. I’ve got enough mail to deliver without walking all the way to the train station for weekly special deliveries.’ He stormed off, heaving his bag up over his shoulder.

  I gasped, trying to hide my concern in front of Charlotte. Gérard’s writing. I ignored the nervous little tick in my stomach, and then got a bit sick looking at the heart-shaped doodle next to my name. Every week a letter? Charlotte leaned her backside against her building. She probably had the rest of the letters in her office, having read them while drinking her gin.

  I pulled my shoulders back, looking up at her.

  ‘It’s not like you want them,’ she said. ‘So, stop looking at me that way.’ Her voice was higher than I remembered, sharper.

  I ripped the envelope right in half, tossing it into the gutter.

  She sucked air in through her teeth, but then laughed. ‘Watch out, Adèle. For when he comes back.’

  Her words hung in the air between us.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘You know what I mean.’ She pulled a cigarette from her dress pocket, which she lit with short puffs, creating a thick white cloud above her head as she exhaled.

  ‘Since when do you smoke?’ I said.

  Her dagger gaze slid over my shoulder down the street. ‘Great,’ she said, puffing some more. ‘First you, and now Pauline…’

  Mama had just come out of the Catholic church and stood on the street corner, talking to Prêtre Champoix, nodding, before noticing Charlotte and me. I was surprised. Mama didn’t ride with me, and I wondered how she got into the city without a car. She glanced back and forth between us and the priest as they finished their conversation before walking up to Charlotte, her hands cl
utched around her pocketbook. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Charlotte turned her head, blowing smoke from her mouth.

  ‘I had to hear about your loss from gossiping clergy? Didn’t have the decency to tell your own mother?’ She reached for Charlotte’s dress where her baby bump should have been proudly showing and pinched the fabric to gauge the size of her body. ‘When did it happen?’

  Charlotte glared at her, swiftly taking Mama’s hand off her dress. ‘What were you doing with the Catholics? Prêtre Champoix can sense an imposter.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject, Charlotte.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask your darling?’ Charlotte said, stomping her cigarette out. ‘I can’t believe she didn’t tell you—honestly, Mother.’

  Mama squinted. ‘You knew?’

  ‘It wasn’t my place, Mama.’ I put my hands up, but the look in Mama’s eyes nearly crushed me.

  ‘Humph!’ Charlotte puffed. ‘You mean you kept your nose out of my business? That’s a new one.’

  We matched each other’s cold stare, while Mama gazed at both of us, alternating her glances between both her daughters. ‘How could my girls turn out so different from one another? You used to be best friends. Inseparable. When you were children, I couldn’t tell which was which, both of you covered in dirt from running around the vineyard all day.’

  ‘That was many years ago,’ I said. ‘We’re women now, Mama.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Charlotte said.

  A single catchfly fell from a woman’s bundle big in her arms as she ran past. I picked it up and handed it to Charlotte. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Join us. It’s still not too late for you. Pétain’s path isn’t the way. The Reich has rolled right over him. You must realize that now.’

  She snatched the catchfly from my hand only to throw it on the ground next to her smashed cigarette. Mama’s eyebrows rose from the rub. ‘I raised you to behave better than that.’

  ‘Oh, did you, Pauline?’ Charlotte turned her cheek.

  Mama took a short breath when Charlotte called her by her given name, and then looked sad. And we stood there, all three of us, waiting for the other to do something, the din of the crowd rising from the square.