The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  ‘This whole area’s full of Krauts,’ one of the soldiers said to Jess. ‘I wouldn’t take that road. Although who knows which road you should take. We don’t even know where the infantry is, let alone where the front is. But they said thirty Panzers are coming down that road. So …’ He shrugged, fatalistic, as if thirty Panzers against one Sherman tank wasn’t a big deal.

  ‘We’ll go back,’ Jess said to Catherine, knowing that such a fluid situation wasn’t the best way to initiate someone into battle.

  She turned the jeep around and, not long after, had to jump out and hit the ditch when a Stuka flew overhead, shooting. The noise was so loud and the concussion so fierce that it robbed their breath. Catherine clutched Jess’s hand.

  ‘You okay?’ Jess asked.

  Catherine nodded.

  As they were cautiously preparing to stand, another jeep, driving furiously, churning up dirt and snow, pulled to a halt. Jess waved when she recognised Iris Carpenter and Lee Carson in the vehicle. Emile, whom Jess thankfully hadn’t seen since Paris, was with them, hunched in the passenger seat of the jeep, cameras around his neck as if he’d actually been working rather than playing cruel jokes on singers, as had been his main occupation at the Hotel Scribe.

  ‘We’re pulling out of Spa,’ Iris said. She and Lee had both managed to stick with the press camp and ignore the crude First Army Press Song which was sung daily by the male correspondents – Jess suspected this had a lot to do with a certain relationship Iris had formed with one of the PROs up there. ‘Headquarters and the press camp is moving to Liège.’

  ‘Christ,’ Jess said. ‘Things are bad.’

  ‘Come and see.’ Iris beckoned.

  ‘Let’s just go,’ Emile muttered.

  Lee rolled her eyes. ‘You wanted a ride out of Spa,’ she said impatiently to Emile. ‘It means you go where we go.’

  Jess and Catherine followed Lee up the hill to a ridge where a flood of traffic appeared. Bumper to bumper, the most dangerous way to travel with the Luftwaffe strafing above, a convoy of retreating US Army trucks and tanks was coming towards them.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ Jess said to Catherine, knowing there was nothing more perilous than sitting in a slow-moving column of vehicles, unable to speed up if needed.

  Before they could, the Stukas screamed through the air once more. The Sherman tank they’d seen earlier, the one whose crew they’d spoken with, was bombed barely one hundred yards away. The sound was hellish and they all dived for the ground, covering their heads with their arms but not before Jess, and Catherine too, saw the tank light up and incinerate before anyone could get out of it. Jess knew that every single man had died in the infernal flames.

  Catherine broke down then, sobbing into Jess’s shoulder, while Jess tried to keep her own tears in her eyes and not break down too.

  ‘Shhh,’ Jess whispered as she rubbed Catherine’s back, praying that the Stukas wouldn’t fly past again, cursing herself for bringing the girl with her. The girl. The boys. They were all the same age as Jess but sometimes she felt a thousand years old: how could anyone ever laugh again after seeing men imprisoned in flame, dying a terrible death.

  A long moan had rent the air as the tank exploded. Jess had somehow imagined it came from the tank but as she lifted her head she saw that it had come from Emile, that his mind was desiccated by slaughter. ‘Go home,’ she said to him, not unkindly. ‘There’s nothing for you here. There’s nothing here for any of us.’

  It was the truth but Emile still glared at her. ‘That’s why it suits you,’ he said bitterly. ‘Because you are nothing. Nothing more than a face and a smile.’

  ‘You forgot to mention the body,’ she said, the words acid on her tongue, before she stood up with Catherine and walked away.

  It was a long four-hour trek back to Reims with a nervous Catherine, who wanted Jess to stay at the hospital rather than go back to the chateau on her own. It was tempting, Jess had to admit. But she didn’t want to give Jennings or Sparrow or anyone else a chance to take any more souvenirs from her room, nor did she want to admit that she was scared to go back, scared to walk into a chateau with men she’d thought were on her side but who, she now understood, still saw her first and foremost as the woman in the picture with the naked back, the woman whom any man would want warming his godforsaken bed. She wanted to cry, and she couldn’t do it there.

  She made it back near midnight and didn’t bother to eat, just fell into bed in her nest in the attic. But sleep was on the wrong side of the front and she couldn’t reach it. Every time she closed her eyes, the image of the burning men inside the tank scalded her eyes. Instead she lay, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the officers on the floors below, the laughter of the men in the tents in the fields drifting through her windows, Emile’s words – you are nothing – striking her ears like machine gun fire. It was what every man at Reims thought. Emile had been the only one brave enough to say it to her face.

  The GIs’ laughter rang on through the night. Jess’s nightmares were of fire, and of men gathered in packs in their tents, sniggering over a woman they’d turned into a coin-operated machine. All they had to do was put in enough whiskey or perfume or money and her body would be theirs, for as long as it continued to amuse them.

  The intermittent sleep and the dreams made her angrier and angrier. As soon as the sun rose, she marched down to the first floor, so livid that she forgot to knock when she reached Dan’s room.

  ‘How many of your men do you think I’ve slept with?’ Jess demanded as she shoved open the door and stormed inside, only to find him naked from the waist up, shaving over an old porcelain wash basin, a relic of the chateau’s once gracious past.

  He paused, razor in hand to stare at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Can’t give me the exact number?’ she continued. ‘Let’s try a range. Stop me when I’m close. One to five? No? Five to ten? More? Forty to fifty? Jesus!’ She advanced into the room. ‘None!’ she continued. ‘I have slept with exactly none of your men. Zero, null, nada, zilch. And now I don’t know why I bothered with abstinence. I like sex. I could have been having sex. But no, I told myself not to behave the way everyone thinks I will. So I’ve spent twelve bloody frustrating months celibate and now I discover that, according to your men, I’ve slept with at least half of them!’

  Dan’s mouth twitched, and then he convulsed into helpless laughter.

  Jess stared at him with disbelief. And everything she’d feared suddenly seemed unbearably true. That he was in on it too. ‘What is so funny?’

  He was laughing so hard now that he collapsed into a chair, unable to speak. Jess was unable to speak too, could only feel the God-awful punch of knowledge that Dan might not have been the friend she thought he was.

  When he finally managed to take hold of himself, he said, ‘It’s just that you’re the only woman I know who would tell me how much she likes having sex and how frustrated she is and not even realise that it isn’t the kind of conversation I could ever have imagined having with any woman just two years ago.’

  As he spoke, Jess’s words replayed in her mind. ‘Oh God!’ she sighed. ‘I came in here to convince you of my unimpeachable reputation and I’ve just convinced you of the exact opposite, haven’t I?’

  ‘You haven’t convinced me of anything because I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said. His face became grave. ‘Tell me.’

  She shook her head, determined to leave before she embarrassed herself any further. ‘It doesn’t matter. Temporary insanity.’

  He stood up, took her gently by the shoulders and led her back to his chair. ‘I want to know.’

  This time, when she spoke, all her anger was gone and she could hear that her voice sounded so tired and so resigned, and so – sad. ‘I overheard Sparrow and Jennings talking. Sparrow was asking Jennings why he didn’t have his J Club badge, which is apparently an honorary award bestowed on everyone in your battalion to have slept with me. And I just …’ She pau
sed to hide the cracking in her voice, which she knew wasn’t just because of Jennings and Sparrow; it was because of the tank and Catherine and every dead and damaged body she’d seen over the past year. ‘I thought they’d moved beyond the fact I was a woman. But I don’t think they’ll ever move past that. I’m a woman first and everything else comes a long way after.’

  She stood up, fists clenched, jaw tight. ‘And now I’m being everything they expect me to be. Weak. Unable to put up with the teasing. A tale-teller. Forget I said anything. But I guess …’ She hesitated. ‘I think of you as a friend first and the guy in charge second. Which I should probably stop doing.’

  She turned and hurried out, taking the jeep and pushing it out along the road to the north, camera ready for whatever she might find in the land that lay beyond reality.

  Fifteen

  As Jess drove, she remembered the story she’d wanted to write but had been too scared to pursue. Until now. So she didn’t go as far as the Ardennes. Instead, almost hating herself for doing it because how could she betray the men she’d seen burned alive in the tank yesterday, but knowing that if she didn’t, she was betraying all of the women instead, she stopped near Sedan. She knocked on doors, spoke to the women, asked them about the soldiers who’d passed through, both German and American. What were they like? How did they treat the villagers? Did they ask for what they wanted or did they just take whatever they thought they had a right to?

  Not many women would speak to her once her questions changed from the general to the specific. But she kept asking, kept taking notes, kept photographing these women who’d seen more than anyone knew since 1940. One woman, Marie-Laure, whose husband was a prisoner of war in Germany and whose father had been killed by the Germans for helping downed British airmen evade capture, asked Jess to dine with her and her mother.

  ‘We only have a little bread, and some cheese,’ Marie-Laure said. She looked to be about eighteen, but that could just be the effect of poor diet over the long years of war.

  ‘I have chocolate, and cigarettes,’ Jess said, offering the two items that were more sought after than money.

  Marie-Laure’s mother accepted both with a silent nod. In fact, she didn’t speak at all over dinner. But her daughter did.

  ‘We always give our food and our cows and our chickens to the soldiers,’ Marie-Laure said as she smoked a Lucky Strike, ignoring the food. ‘But then there were no more chickens or cows to give, and the vegetables in the garden were too small. Unsatisfactory. My father had a pilot hiding in the cellar. The Germans came. Perhaps … perhaps we should have given them the pilot. But then they would have taken my father too. So –’

  Marie-Laure shrugged, stood up and walked over to kiss the top of her mother’s head.

  ‘They told us to choose,’ Marie-Laure continued quietly. ‘Me, or my mother. So I went with them to the bedroom. There were four men. The fifth was given the job of keeping my mother and father in the kitchen.’

  Jess’s pen moved over her paper. She did not look up as Marie-Laure spoke because she sensed her shame, that she did not want Jess’s eyes on her while she talked. Jess wanted to shout: You aren’t the one who should be ashamed! But Marie-Laure hadn’t yet finished.

  ‘When the last one was nearly done, the others left the room. They came back with my mother. And they made me watch.’

  Jess’s eyes burned with useless tears.

  ‘The next day, they returned.’ Marie-Laure lit another cigarette. ‘My mother hadn’t been able to leave her bed since they’d gone. My father was on the floor by the bed crying. The Boche took the pilot, and my father. It had all been for nothing.’

  It had all been for nothing. The words rang in Jess’s head as she drove back to Reims.

  And Marie-Laure had said one last terrible thing to Jess before she left.

  ‘Two weeks ago, some Americans were here. This time, I just took off my dress. It hurts less when you don’t struggle.’

  Jess knew that nobody would publish it if she wrote it into a story. Nobody wanted to read about American soldiers raping the women of a country that had been under German rule for years, behaving as everyone imagined the Germans did. Nobody wanted to see what lay beneath the resignation on Marie-Laure’s face and the silence of her mother’s mouth, which Jess had captured in a photograph of the two of them, sitting at the table before two thin slices of bread, gripping their cigarettes as if keeping hold of their sanity.

  What to do? The question haunted Jess on the long, dark road home as she used every bit of strength and judgement to make her way without a navigator, praying there would be no Germans on the road, no bombs, no 88s, no shells, no reason to have to leap out of the jeep and into a ditch and lie in the shadows alone. She reached the chateau late, tired, filthy, every muscle taut.

  It was quiet, many of the rooms unlit, some of the men in the tents still moving about, but she could see that a light still shone brightly in Dan’s room, and in hers right at the top. She shook her head. Surely the men weren’t stealing more souvenirs? She might as well just empty her bag on the lawn and tell them to take what they wanted. She was too tired to fight anymore.

  She climbed the stairs, cameras digging into her shoulders, stomach growling at eating nothing but a K-ration all day. The door to her room was ajar and she stopped short at the sight of Sparrow and Jennings and several others in her room. So they had come to take everything that was left.

  But then she realised that Sparrow had a broom in his hand. Jennings was tucking clean sheets onto her bed, another GI was putting a tray of food down on the table she used as a desk. On the bed were all her uniforms, washed and pressed and folded with military precision. She rubbed her eyes.

  The men saw her and stood stiffly to attention. ‘Captain May,’ they said in unison.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked warily.

  ‘Tidying your room, ma’am,’ Jennings answered.

  ‘I can see that. But why?’

  The men looked sheepishly at one another and then Sparrow, face tinged red, replied. ‘We’re all done, Captain May. I hope it’s satisfactory.’

  ‘It’s like heaven,’ she said. ‘But why?’

  None of them answered. Instead they filed out, heads down, gazes fixed to the floor.

  Jess’s bag dropped to the ground and she placed her camera on the bed, wincing when she saw the dirty mark her hand left on the clean sheets. And that smear, for some reason, undid her. The tears she hadn’t allowed herself to shed while she listened to Marie-Laure’s terrible tale filled her eyes now and she stood still for a long moment, swallowing hard, the ache in her throat almost insupportable.

  She knew why the men were in her room. And she knew there was at least one man in the chateau who saw past the smile and the face and the body to the things that really were inside her, who didn’t think she was nothing. When the tightness in her throat eased, she walked down the stairs and knocked at Dan’s door.

  ‘Come in,’ she heard him call, faintly, as if he wasn’t quite in the room.

  She pushed open the door but couldn’t see him. A gentle swish of white drapes caught her attention. The door to the balcony stood open and she could see the back of his head, leaning against a sofa that had been dragged out there, taking up almost all the room.

  ‘Dan?’ she called from the door.

  ‘You can come in, Jess.’

  She left the door open for propriety, a gesture that almost made her laugh, and stepped outside, drawing in her breath as she did so. The room was at the back of the chateau, looking north towards Belgium and over the tents and the remaining snares of garden, which fell away to the canal, a black ribbon in the distance. The night sky draped softly around them like velvet, stars dotted over its surface. There were no clouds to obscure the points of light, just the delicate waft and plume of white phosphorus. At regular intervals a shell or a tracer arc lit up the sky beyond like an unearthly rainbow or a falling star. A comet, even. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she brea
thed.

  ‘I know,’ Dan said.

  She dropped onto the sofa beside him.

  ‘You’re just in time.’ Dan held up a glass of cognac and passed it to her.

  She sipped gratefully. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You look like you’ve had a day and a half,’ he said, studying her face.

  ‘Topped off by my arrival in my room to find six men cleaning it. My uniforms are washed. My bed has clean sheets.’

  ‘I asked for all the members of the J Club to assemble this afternoon,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I expect what they got wasn’t quite what they anticipated. I told them I’d heard of the J Club and understood that the J stood for Janitor. Their janitorial services were required in your room, for as long as it took, until everything was spotless.’

  ‘They’ll hate me.’

  Dan shook his head. ‘No they won’t. They’ll know they did the wrong thing. Fine, find a way to let off some steam but not at the expense of somebody’s character. If I didn’t do anything about it, then that’s as good as saying I think it’s okay. It’s not.’ He paused, watching another tracer dance across the sky. ‘You’re back late.’

  She passed the glass back to him. ‘I’d heard whispers about soldiers raping women. And I found someone who spoke to me about it. I don’t think I can ignore it, even though I know I’ll never be able to publish it.’

  He didn’t reply and Jess clammed her mouth shut. She’d given him one too many confidences. How could he condone her doing something like this, actively slandering the organisation that he, as an officer, was sworn to uphold? But then he said, quietly, ‘You should write it anyway.’

  A faint smile drifted onto her face. If only the army was peopled with men like Dan, rather than men like Warren.

  She turned the conversation back to the reason she was late, not wanting to tell him anything else; it wasn’t fair to drop the burden of what she was doing onto him. ‘The drive took forever,’ she sighed. ‘I didn’t realise how much time you save when you have someone navigating and watching one half of the road for you.’