The French Photographer

by Natasha Lester

  For the rest of the drive, Jess wondered what she would say to Bel. How she would make her believe that her camera hadn’t created the pictures, that she hadn’t zoomed in too narrowly or composed the image in such a way that it seemed worse than it actually was. That the savagery was real.

  I implore you to believe this, was how she would begin, begging Bel to let the women of the camp speak, to declare to the world that their lives had, after all, not been for nought.

  Night had cast a shroud over them well before they reached Dan’s HQ. Then it was another long drive back to the press camp, a drive Jess wasn’t sure she was up to. She was hugely grateful when Dan said, ‘Stay here tonight. There are some female translators and WACs around. I’m sure you can bunk in with them.’

  She nodded. ‘Thanks.’

  They were the only words exchanged. Dan spoke briefly to a woman exiting the mess to secure a bed for Jess. The woman smiled so brightly that Jess wanted to hold up a hand to ward her off. She told Jess to follow her and soon she was found a tent and a bedroll. But she knew she needed to shower. She had to sluice off the smell that clung to her, had to wipe away all the physical remains of the day in a way she could never erase the images and stories from her mind.

  As she set off for the ablutions, she heard a strange noise, a rending of the pall of night with a sound that was at once incendiary and keening. She kept walking, flashlight on, until the familiar smell of latrines told her she was going the right way and she found the fabric flaps that screened off a shower.

  She pushed open the flaps and the smell assaulted her first: base and foreboding. And then she saw. She dropped the flashlight instinctively, knowing she couldn’t face any more brutality.

  The sound came as she dropped to her knees – a cry so loud and so long and so excruciating that she thought at first it must have come from the man slumped in the shower stall, gun drowning in the pool of blood at his side, face smashed through by the bullet, but still unmistakable as Sparrow.

  Twenty

  As dawn touched the sky the morning after Sparrow killed himself, Jess took a jeep, stopped at the press camp to write her story and parcel up her film, and then Marty drove her to Paris. On the way, her mind played ceaselessly over the peacock, the guard, the bodies in the boxcar, the women’s eyes, and Sparrow, resplendent in his patriotic dress the night of the party in Reims. Sparrow, his bloodied head in her lap when Dan and a group of others heard her God-awful cries and found her. Dan ordering someone to lift her up and take her away. A glimpse of Dan sitting where she had sat, cradling Sparrow like a brother.

  What time I am afraid, I shall trust in Thee. The words, one of many prayers from the US Army Prayer Book, words that were supposed to provide comfort to a man like Sparrow when he most needed it, echoed mercilessly in her head. Where had God been when Sparrow had needed him, when he’d made his way to the shower, when he’d felt more frightened of living than of anything else? Jess shut her eyes but the tears pressed mercilessly through her lids.

  One day and one unsleeping night back in the Hotel Scribe was enough to convince her that she couldn’t go on that way. Marty suggested a party and in her voice Jess heard the same fatigue, the same enervation, the same fracturing sound of a person pushed so close to their breaking point that anything, even a mistimed smile, might cause them to snap.

  So a party they would have the following night. She made sure the word was spread out to the hotels used by the GIs – everyone who’d been at the camp had been given several days’ leave and most had come to Paris.

  When it was time to dress, she dismissed her pinks. She was going to wear a damn normal dress – no Chanel, no Schiaparelli; she refused to wear anyone who’d run from the war. She’d wear the dress she’d been carrying in the bottom of her bag since she’d arrived in Europe, the dress she’d left in London and then in Paris for safekeeping. The dress she’d had Estella Bissette make for her before she’d left America, before she understood that war was not a noun but a wretchedness imprisoned inside a smiling face.

  She opened the wardrobe and took it out, running her hand along the skirt out of habit, the black satin pooling in her fingers. She put it on, the white bodice covered with delicate and lovely lace, the scooped back reminding her of the Jessica May in the magazine photos she’d once been, the nipped-in waist underscoring the fact that rations were not enough to subsist on for very long, the skirt dropping like midnight into a long train that would most likely be crushed and torn by the boots of the GIs who came to the party.

  She would wear it anyway and she would smile and behind the lipstick she would hide the fact that every night when she lay down, she had to first drink enough whiskey so that the images before her eyes blurred into indistinction.

  Hemingway came, along with all the correspondents in Paris. He took up a place on the balcony among the jerry cans of fuel and waited with a bottle of whiskey for everyone to pay homage to him, which Mary Welsh was still doing. Marty rolled her eyes at Hemingway and danced with James Gavin, the divisional commander who’d caught more than her eye. Picasso and Simone de Beauvoir strolled in; Jess’s currency as a model and her past relationship with Emile – who’d thankfully given up his accreditation pass and, even though he was now living in Paris, knew well enough not to come – was enough to make sure that if she was having a party, most of one slice of Paris would hear about it and come along.

  Then came the GIs, not just from Dan’s battalion but others she and Martha had met over the past eighteen months. The tiny room was thick with bodies and she could see that was all part of the appeal, the press of flesh to flesh, a dance and a kiss and who knew where it might lead. Because they all had a reason to seek oblivion, to erase, for just one night, the awful press of knowledge that Allied victories didn’t erase the abominable things that had already been done.

  To help the mood, the gramophone played French jazz, the lights were off, the room was lit by candles, and Jess had found some vermouth, which she’d used to make a Manhattan; a Manhattan wasn’t champagne and it wasn’t schnapps and therefore it couldn’t remind her of war. But as for everything else …

  She leaned her back against the door, holding the almost empty Manhattan by the rim, the glass resting against her leg. The door behind her opened suddenly, propelling her forward, knocking the remaining liquid from her glass.

  She turned around and saw Dan.

  ‘Oh, it’s only you,’ he said, then shook his head. ‘I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I just meant …’

  ‘That you’re glad it’s not someone who’ll make a fuss about being knocked over by a door and having vermouth spilt on her one fine dress.’

  ‘You’ve never made a fuss about anything even though you’ve had more cause than most.’ There it was, a veiled reference to what they’d seen and he smiled at her but she could see it was an action rather than a sentiment. That he’d forgotten how to be happy.

  He joined her, his back against the wall too, staring at Picasso who was asleep in the chair before Jess’s typewriter, at Hemingway and his band of admirers, at Jennings slavering over a woman who was equally slavering over him and Jess saw in his desperation that Jennings was no longer the young boy who’d managed to injure himself everywhere except the battlefield; he was now a man with a bruised soul.

  ‘You don’t have a drink,’ she said to Dan.

  ‘Is it helping?’ he asked, nodding at the now empty glass in her hand.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is any of it helping?’ He gestured to the room.

  She shook her head, then slipped her hand into his. She didn’t expect to find comfort there; knew that comfort was impossible but he squeezed her hand in return and didn’t take his eyes off her face. For the smallest fraction of time – a second split in two – they stood with hands clasped, eyes locked, the music scattering crotchets around them, the candles bathing their skin gold.

  Then her other hand reached out to run one finger ever so lightly along th
e line of his jaw, to feel the stubble there, stubble she’d seen most days since she’d been in Europe, stubble she’d never really noticed because everything was about the war and the fighting and the dying. Nothing was ever about them. But this moment was. Two people, hearts flayed by the cruelties they’d seen, stopped in a moment of rare beauty.

  He leaned down and whispered in her ear, his breath hot against her skin, ‘Can we ask them to leave?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  She clapped her hands and declared that the party was over, that they should all retire to the bar downstairs so she could get her beauty sleep. Nobody except Martha noticed that Dan didn’t leave with the rest of them.

  Once the last person had gone and the door was shut, Jess and Dan remained where they were, backs against the wall, hands no longer joined because she’d had to let go of him to kiss everyone goodbye. The candles flickered in the breeze wafting in from the balcony, then Dan turned to her.

  This time, it was his finger that reached out and traced a line down her neck, over her right collarbone and then her left. She could hear the sound of her breath, anything but calm now, and saw the pulse in his throat beat faster.

  She stepped closer, the air between them alight with everything that hadn’t happened since they’d last stood this close together in a ballroom, when he’d told her, with the touch of his thumb, that he wanted her.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Don’t you feel a need to make the pictures stop, just for an hour or two?

  ‘Yes,’ he said too, cupping her cheeks and drawing her in.

  And Jess at last kissed Dan.

  They kissed and they kissed, his hands sliding up her back, hers wrapped around his neck. After a long and luxurious time in which they both revelled in the sensation of finally doing what they’d wanted to do in the ballroom at Lieu de Rêves, Dan moved his lips to her throat, tasting the skin with the tip of his tongue, kissing the hollow between her collarbones, then the sharp points of her shoulders and she could feel the apologies and regrets over everything that hadn’t been his fault but that he wished her never to have seen – and him too – over the past two years press into her skin. Her arms tightened.

  ‘We need a bed,’ she said and he nodded and took her hand and followed her across the room.

  They didn’t quite make it to the bed, though, because one of the candles illuminated Dan’s face, catching it unarmed and she had to stop and stroke his cheek, to try to, with the tips of her fingers, redraw it into the face of a young man who knew only hopes and dreams and joy. She kept her eyes on him as she unbuttoned his shirt and he smiled at her and this time she saw the emotion that should always accompany the action and she was glad.

  Then she let her fingers roam across the hard muscles of his chest, let her lips taste the skin there. She felt his heart beating hard against her mouth, his dog tags shiver, heard the quick gasp of breath as her fingers found the top of his hipbones.

  She turned around so he could unfasten her dress. Once he’d done so, he slipped his hands into the open back and ran them down her spine, touching her skin so gently, so lightly that she closed her eyes, adoring the sensation of being held in a reverent way.

  At last, he moved the dress over her hips, where it fell to the floor. He brought his hands around to drift over her stomach, travelling up to her breasts in a slow and glorious dance. Finally he touched one nipple and then the other, lingering, touch firmer now, taking his time. Then he began to kiss her neck, her shoulder, the top of her back and she spun around because she couldn’t stand it anymore.

  Her mouth found his and he moved his hands down to her knickers, slipping them off, before lifting her, legs wrapped around him, and carrying her to the bed where he lay her down.

  ‘You have too many clothes on,’ she whispered.

  ‘I can fix that,’ he whispered back, shucking everything off.

  The candles still shone and she hadn’t drawn the drapes so she could see by the moonlight that he was as aroused as she. She reached out for him, wanting him beside her, wanting her hands and mouth on him. She kissed his chest; she could lie there and kiss that chest forever, she thought, but he had other ideas and he slipped a hand between her legs, which made her inhale sharply and say, ‘Mmmm, you can do that again.’

  He smiled again and he almost sounded like the old Dan when he said, ‘Good to see you’re as unabashed in bed as you are everywhere else.’

  She laughed. ‘Would you prefer I didn’t tell you what feels good?’

  ‘No. Tell me. Because this is all about feeling good.’ His fingers found her breast again.

  ‘Well, perhaps your mouth could follow where your hand is leading,’ she said.

  ‘Jess.’ He spoke her name in a voice thick with desire and that was it; as if they both agreed they couldn’t wait any longer.

  She straddled him, sliding him inside her, leaning forward to kiss him and she heard him say her name again, urgently, and then she couldn’t think anymore as she moved against him, gasping as a kind of pleasure she’d never known slid through her entire body.

  Afterwards, Dan lay on his back, head on the pillow, and Jess lay across the bed, head resting against his chest. He lit two cigarettes, passing one to her. She exhaled blue smoke into the room, which caught the light from the street.

  ‘Doesn’t it seem like night-time is too bright in the city now?’ she asked. ‘I’ve become so used to blackout curtains and no street-lighting, to the dark of being out in the field, that this feels like some kind of strange eternal day.’

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve been here since the blackout was lifted,’ Dan said. ‘And last night I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t work out why at first. I thought it might be the noise.’

  ‘It’s hardly quiet out in the field.’

  ‘I know. It was the light. And you’re right; it feels like everything outside is on fire. Or else as if …’

  ‘We really are in hell.’ She breathed in smoke again, blew out, watching the thin stream sparkle in a way it wouldn’t in her quarters in Germany.

  ‘I think we discovered that a long time ago,’ Dan whispered.

  Neither spoke for a long moment. Jess rolled onto her side, so she could look up at him. ‘Talking like this isn’t making the pictures stop.’

  ‘It’s not.’ He reached down and took the butt of her cigarette from her, stubbed it out in the ashtray on the bedside table, then stroked a finger lightly through her hair. ‘I know everyone ribs you about your short hair and your predilection for trousers but I have to say that, even though I’ve always thought you were beautiful, I wasn’t expecting to find such an incredible body hiding beneath the uniform.’ His finger trailed down to the top of her breast.

  ‘Yours isn’t so bad either,’ she smiled. ‘And you don’t need to flatter me. I know half the men have pages from Vogue of me in my modelling days. I’m sure you’ve seen more of my body before today than you’re admitting.’

  ‘I never look at that stuff, Jess. From that day in the foxhole in Italy, you became one of us. So, like I said, it’s impossible not to see you as beautiful but I saw it in the same way that you know Jennings has freckles. A fact, not a feeling. And I let the men keep their posters because it gives them hope. But you’re one of my men. Were one of my men,’ he corrected himself with a grin. ‘Now I don’t know what the hell you are.’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t know either.’ She propped her elbow on his chest, rested her head in her hand. ‘Do you think that we’ll ever, once we’re back in America after this is all over, be able to forget? Not forget this,’ she added, touching his cheek, ‘but everything else?’

  ‘It’ll fade.’ Dan threaded his fingers into hers. ‘It might linger for a bit but then, finally, it’ll disappear, like cigarette smoke. Everything does.’

  ‘Do you think so? And doesn’t Sparrow deserve more than that?’

  ‘He does.’

  Nei
ther spoke for a long time. Jess lay her head down again, her ear filled with the sound of Dan’s heartbeat, slow and steady and inexorable. She ran her hand along his chest and he curved an arm around her, warm and strong, and little by little, in that tranquil and private moment, she felt her limbs relax and the pictures fade once more.

  It was late when they at last fell asleep and early when Jess woke, listening to a Paris that sounded almost the same as the city she’d left in 1939: the elegance of the language rolling up from the streets below, the clatter of chairs placed on the pavements for those who had time to linger over coffee, the occasional horn blasting its way through pedestrians who’d forgotten, over the long years of hardly any cars on the streets, that they now had to cede way.

  She stepped lightly out of the bed, smiling at the way Dan looked when sleeping – on his back, one arm flung over his head, black lashes curving upwards from his closed eyes, eminently kissable. Her eyes ran over the dark hair, the line of black stubble along his jaw, the dog tags sitting on the muscles of his chest, which rose and fell as he breathed. She reluctantly moved over to the window, knowing that if she stared at him for longer she’d want to at least kiss him, if not trail her hands over his body. But he deserved to sleep.

  Instead she gazed out the window at the people moving below, at the shops still clogged with queues, at the lack, the lovely lack of German uniforms. At the British uniforms, the American, the French. At the undiminished presence of the Opéra to her right. At the streets to her left that led down to the elegance of the Place Vendôme, and then the Seine. She felt the wonder of not instinctively ducking or crouching or diving each time she heard a sudden noise, of not having to keep her head down, of not being always on the alert.

  But she also saw the absences: the Jewish people who might once have held businesses in this area, the men who should be rushing to work, the joy that a spring morning in Paris, with the air perfumed by lilies and rose and chestnut, should bring. And if she listened hard, she could still hear, beneath everything, the guns, the bombs, the screams, the sirens, the sobs.