Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  It was the very following day—August 23—that the summer’s electrifying event occurred: The Soviets, after five months of fruitless negotiations with Great Britain and France, announced that they had signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. The mailman had shouted the news across the river to my uncle, even before we held our daily noontime session over the wireless radio. “That’s it, there’ll be war any time now,” was my father’s grim response. Our summer vacation was abruptly cut short. It was decided that everyone should vacate La Croze within twenty-four hours and return to Paris. My next memory is of driving back to the city, seated between my father and Aunt Sandra, my head on her lap. It is night. In a calm, resigned tone this time, my father is lecturing Sandra on the imminence of World War II. God only knows how much he hates the communists, he is saying, but the way the French and English dragged their feet throughout their negotiations, what did you expect the Russians to do? Marshall Voroshilov was ready to put in thousands of armored divisions into the fray; the British and French had only a couple of hundred to offer! Tanks, tanks are what the French should have concentrated on, instead of that inane Maginot Line…. My pacific, deeply apolitical aunt begins to nod over his words, her head now slumping toward my prone body. “And now our only ally in the east is the dear, antiquated Polish cavalry,” my father continues. “Their idea of warfare is so archaic they still look on horses as the crucial components of any army.” “Are you leaving for the war soon?” I ask him as my aunt’s head thuds against my shoulder. “Yes, my rabbit, very soon,” hesays, stroking my head. “Aunt Simone and Uncle André and Maman and Aunt Sandra will take good care of you.”

  Bertrand and Francine hiking in the Gorges du Tarn, August 1939, a few weeks before the outbreak of World War II.

  Tatiana and Bertrand at St. Moritz, mid-1930s.

  Bertrand du Plessix on military duty in the Mediterranean in the last months of 1939.

  He was mobilized the day after we returned to Paris. A day or two later, the Monestiers took me to spend the week at their other country house, in Picardy. My father was expected for a brief visit that Saturday, on his way to join his unit. I recall the canine patience with which I waited for him on the steps of the house, staring at the green, lush little circular driveway, bordered by my aunt’s roses, which faced the front steps. He was due to arrive at three, but the traffic—many Parisians were fleeing the capital in expectation of imminent war—delayed his arrival by six hours.

  I kept on sitting on the steps of the porch, surging with excitement each time I heard the sound of a car approaching the Monestiers’ estate, impervious to the adults’ call for me to come out of the chill, weeping and screaming when they tried to cajole me into the house. I wanted to see Papa in his new uniform! I wanted to catch sight of him the very second he came out of his car!! They let me have my way. Finally, the familiar burgundy Peugeot appeared in the driveway and he came out of the car, the gold braid gleaming on his officer’s uniform. He swept me up into his arms, and we went in to dinner. Soon after the meal, I began to doze off—it was way past my bedtime—but I grasped the sense of the conversation: My father had brought a copy of his last will and testament. In case “something happened” to him, he wished Uncle André Monestier (who, like all men over forty, was not to be mobilized until some months later) to be my legal guardian until I was twenty-one.

  Germany attacked Poland on September 1. War was declared by Great Britain at dawn on September 3 and by the reluctant French eight hours later. By August 29 my father had already left for the Polish front. As a specialist in Polish affairs, he had been assigned to be liaison officer to Air Force General Jules Armengaud, who headed the unit sent by the French government to offer standby assistance to Poland even before the war officially began. “For the third time in seventy years”—I remember words to that effect creating a headline of Le Figaro in early September—“the Venus de Milo has left the Louvre for safekeeping in a secret location in the provinces.” During those first weeks of the war, it was de rigueur to carry one’s gas mask in a canister, hung over the shoulder, a habit I found very glamorous and soldierly. Throughout the early days of September, air-raid alarms shrieked repeatedly through the night. My mother, my governess, and I rushed to the assigned shelter, in the cellar of the neighboring house, which was filled with hysterical women in bathrobes and curlers. Declaring that “the next time it might be the real thing,” my mother, after a few weeks, decided that my governess and I should seek refuge in the country. She felt that the Monestiers’ Picardy estate might be too close to the action—my father had always warned that when Germany attacked France it would be across the Ardennes and the Belgian border. My governess and I were to go instead to a little house in the Gironde that had belonged to Babushka’s brother, Great-granduncle Alexandr Petrovich Kuzmin, which he had left me in his will the previous winter.

  Although far more modest, Uncle Kuzmin’s house, in a village near Arcachon called Gujan-Mestras, was as familiar to me as La Croze, as the Monestiers’ house in the Picardy, as any treasured site of my childhood. Situated in a stretch of flat, monotonous swamp marsh, it was a claustrophobic three-room wooden cottage, devoid of running water or electricity, in which Uncle had sought refuge after suffering the central tragedy of his life: Upon fleeing Russia and settling in Germany, he had fallen deeply in love with and married a circus acrobat. Soon after their marriage, he had spent his life savings buying her a riding academy of her own, but she had fled with a trapezist. Left penniless and heartbroken, he had settled in Gujan-Mestras to while away his time playing solitaire and rereading the Russian classics. By the time I knew him, “Le Monsieur Russe,” as he was referred to by the villagers, was a benign, doddering pensioner with a senile habit, which embarrassed me deeply, of letting his tongue protrude from his perpetually smiling mouth. He vaguely kept up with world news through Russian-language newspapers but otherwise seemed to have sunk, in his advancing age, into Oblomovian lethargy. And he clearly lived for the six summer weeks when Babushka, Sandra, my governess, and I descended on him from Paris.

  We crammed into the tiny house, Babushka and Sandra sharing one of the bedrooms, my governess and I another, Uncle Kuzmin happily making his bed on the living-room couch. There was nothing much to do during our vacations at Gujan-Mestras beyond reading, shopping in the village for the daily victuals, carting water from the rusty pump at the end of the dirt road, and helping Babushka to prepare our frugal Russian meals. And yet I deeply loved those summer nights when we sat around the green glass oil lamp set on the living-room table, under the melancholy stare of the beautiful icon, hung in a corner of the room, that my great-granduncle had preserved during his exodus from Russia. In the tiny room suffused by the smell of steaming kasha, Uncle Kuzmin would be absorbed in his perpetual solitaire, my governess would read or repair some garment, and Babushka would have been badgered into a game of cards or checkers with me. Aunt Sandra played operatic recordings on a crank-up Victrola. Occasionally, while following an aria from Tristan and Isolde or Le Coq d’or in her voluminous, cracking mezzo, her eyes filled with tears at the memory of her glory days at the St. Petersburg opera, and her trembling voice dissolved into a medley of sobs punctuated by a few heroic tremolo notes. Uncle Kuzmin stopped his solitaire, his tongue darting nervously in and out of his mouth. My great-grandmother rushed to Sandra’s chair and rocked her large, sobbing daughter in her arms. “My soul, my treasure,” she whispered, “you’ve had a splendid career, none of us can go on forever.” Upon which the entire family, filled with nostalgia for the lost Russia of decades past, burst into tears, and I readily followed suit.

  But my stay at Gujan-Mestras in September 1939 was deprived of those beloved relatives. In the past year, Uncle Kuzmin and Babushka had both died; Sandra had joined the war effort by working full-time for the Paris Red Cross; and I painfully felt the desolation and void created by Babushka’s death. It was the beginning of the school year, and my governess and I set upon the same bleak sch
edule we’d followed in Paris for years. We took my temperature upon waking. If it was over 37.5 centrigrade, I was confined to bed for the rest of the day, which suited me just fine, since I could pursue my project of reading all of Jules Verne’s novels—Le Rayon vert was my favorite of that season. If the mercury stood well below that mark, we started on our lessons: French dictation, Russian dictation, history, math. The tutoring establishment I’d attended in Paris never failed to send us the assignments, week by week. Every few days, we went to the post office to put in a phone call to my mother, who had sought refuge from the anticipated bombings of Paris with friends just outside the city. (It became clear to me only later that she was staying with Alex at his parents’ weekend house in Chatou.) Our only distraction was the daily walk to the village grocer, on the way to which we would pass the house of Gujan-Mestras’s mayor, a portly communist, perennially attired in a red shirt, who every Sunday sat on his porch, playing recordings of the “Internationale” on a Victrola. And there were occasional visits with a village girl named Colette who’d been a summer playmate for years and who this year began vaguely to initiate me into the mysteries of procreation: Behind the pipi hole, she said, pulling down her pants, was another hole into which men stuck their whaddya-call-it. We couldn’t imagine how guys could stuff that limp little thing, which we’d seen once or twice on dirty old men in public places, into anything whatsoever; and we dismissed the entire report as a rumor.

  Our exile at Gujan-Mestras seems to have lasted from about September 10 to the early days of November. Meanwhile, in Paris, those who had relatives abroad were busy reassuring their loved ones that they were safe. On September 13, Alex wrote a long letter to his father telling him that he was with Tatiana at Chatou (cannily predicting that Jews would be wiser to move out of Europe for the next few years, Simon Liberman had recently settled in New York City). It was clearly a difficult time for Alex, who was feeling considerable guilt—and a certain macho loss of face—because his health had led him to be classified as unfit for military service. Moreover, his hyperpossessive mamasha was doing all in her power to break up his passionate liaison with Tatiana; Alex, in turn, was doing all he could to talk his mother into joining his father in the United States.

  “My beloved,” Alex’s letter to his father reads,

  Above all don’t worry about mamasha and me. I’m so glad that you’re not here, and I’m sure you can be much more useful to France over there than here. We’re living in Chatou now, mamasha, Tania and me. Unfortunately mamasha is very nervous and jealous and it’s hard to be around her—what with her health and nerves, she shouldn’t be here. It would be wonderful if you could find a way to get her to America.

  With Pollyanna idealism, Alex goes on to praise the delusionary confidence of the French’s wartime spirit. “The atmosphere is amazing. Such calmness, courage and decisiveness that one’s spirits are lifted and one is proud to be French…and there’s absolute faith in victory!!” He continues with a passionate statement about the strength Tatiana has offered him, emphasizing, once more, mamasha’s hysterical jealousy.

  I used to be afraid of war, not because of any physical fear, but because I had not experienced happiness yet…. But everything has changed. This last year I’ve experienced such love. It’s made a man out of me and allowed me to create. I’ve found my way, my creativity, my truth in everything…. Tania is always next to me, we’re inseparable…. Everything is so much simpler when you’re with the one you love…. I’m sorry for mamasha. She suffers and makes others suffer. The most painful thing of all is to observe her egoism precisely at the moments when egoism has to be overcome with one’s entire being, when we all have to rise above pettiness and live for something so important beyond us. Now she certainly feels more lonely than ever…. Her jealousy is a torture and there’s nothing I can do about it…. I want to tell you only one thing. I can only tell it to you. I have never been happier in my life than I am now with Tatiana. And I have never loved so, and have never been so loved. Remember this, moi rodnoi—whatever happens, my soul is relieved that I told this to you, to my real friend.

  I kiss you tenderly, Shura.

  In those same weeks, Tatiana was writing to the Soviet Union, responding to a worried letter from her mother and reassuring her that her family was faring fine in wartime. It was the first time since 1935, when the Soviet terror began to hit its peak, that the two women had exchanged letters, and it is startling that this exchange was even allowed: Lyubov Nikolaevna took a considerable risk by urging her daughter to write her back, and Tatiana once more maintained the cryptic, guarded tone essential to protecting loved ones from persecution.

  My unseen Mamulichka,

  I was made endlessly happy by your letter. If you didn’t write for so long, you yourself know why, it doesn’t mean you didn’t think of me. For heaven’s sake don’t worry about us. Here all is in order and we all feel terrific. Of course our husbands are not home, but that’s the general condition. Francine’s in the country with her governess, where she’s faring wonderfully. Lila also is in her country house. I work hard in Paris, so does Auntie Sandra.

  She goes on to mention all the deaths that have affected the family in the past few years: Sasha in May of 1938 (“awful…his unexpectedly premature death terrified everyone here”); Great-uncle Kuzmin in October of the same year; Babushka in the following May (“for us all that was a dreadful loss, and she so adored the little one”). She informs her mother that her hat business has grown greatly, and that Bertrand and Albert Darse, the Parisian hotel owner Lila had married three years earlier, are faring well at the front. “I kiss you and père tenderly,” she ends, “don’t imagine things here to be any worse than they are in reality.”

  The last thing in the world my mother could have mentioned, in a letter to the Soviet Union, was her husband’s difficult mission on the Polish front. The Soviets, in collaboration with Hitler, had just occupied a good hunk of eastern Poland, and my father had barely escaped with his life. His assignment with General Armengaud had kept him on the Polish front throughout that disastrous campaign, which, in great part due to the dazzling superiority of the German Luftwaffe, lasted only for some three weeks. On September 27, when Poland capitulated, whatever Allied troops were still there had to flee for their skins. Armengaud and his retinue found some way to get to Romania, still a relatively neutral country, and then fled on to Albania, whence they took ship to Beirut, and then traveled to Syria. Syria, at the time, was still a French colony and an extremely important military base—the future prime minister Pierre Mendès-France and a considerable number of other prominent French officers were currently posted there. Though most of his unit remained in Syria, Armengaud, one of those frondeur officers who had kept warning the French High Command for years that it was direly misconstruing the pivotal importance of long-range bombers in contemporary warfare, soon returned to Paris. Upon settling in the capital, he wrote a scathing memo to the Ministry of War concerning the French troops’ technical backwardness. But his warning fell, as ever, on deaf ears: the French High Command was headed by the seventy-two-year-old General Gamelin, who was still mired in the trench-based tactics of World War I. And Armengaud was actually demoted to an administrative post at the Ministry of War in punishment for his “progressive” views.

  In early November, we were reassured that my father had safely reached Beirut. My mother called me back to Paris that month, when droves of other Parisians were returning to the city, realizing that a German attack was not imminent. By this time, Paris life seems to have returned to the heedless gaiety of the Années Folles, and my memories of that season are almost exclusively auditory: When I recall those early months of the “drôle de guerre,” I think of brazenly cheerful songs by Maurice Chevalier: “Prosper, yop la boum” “Ah si vous connaissiez ma poule” “Ça sent si bon la France” “Amusez vous” (“La vie, entre nous, est si brève/Amusez vous comme des fous”). I also recall popular 1939 ditties by Charles Trenet: “Y
’a d’la joie” (“Y’a d’la joie, bonjour bonjour les hirondelles, Y’a d’la joie…Y’a d’la joie partout”) and “J’attendrais, j’attendrai toujours,” which beyond its tone of personal longing also expressed the helplessness and boredom of the soldiers waiting in their trenches, experiencing no action beyond desultory patrol duties, for the first eight months of the war.

  But there are two songs that prevail over all others as symbols of the illusions and escapism of that particular year: One is called “Tout va trés bien, Madame La Marquise,” a ditty mocking the fecklessness of the upper classes, which is narrated by a butler reciting to his employer the misfortunes that have befallen her country estate while she has been away. The news gets worse and worse as the song goes along: Her favorite gray mare has died, the loss was caused by a fire in the stables, which in turn was started when the entire château burned down, which occurred when the marquis committed suicide, igniting some candles in the process—but each calamity is counterposed with the reassuring refrain, “Mais à part ça, Madame La Marquise, tout va trés bien, tout va trés bien!” And above all there was “Nous allons pendre notre linge sur la Ligne Siegfried,” also sung in Great Britain as “We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line,” which my little class at the tutoring establishment sang and danced to weekly at recreation time, our hands clasped to one another’s in a circle. It deserves to be quoted to grasp the tragic, inane optimism the French nation was plunged into throughout the first months of the war: