Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line

  ’Cause the washing day is here….

  We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line

  If the Siegfried Line’s still there.

  My other sensory memories—sights, sounds, smells—pick up again in February or so of 1940, when my father, who had fallen very ill in Syria, was flown back to Paris and placed at the military hospital, Val de Grâce. He had contracted a bad case of typhoid complicated by jaundice. My governess and I visited him every few days, trying to take turns with my mother, who brought him meals, magazines, and books and generally attempted to cheer him. Pitifully thin and wasted, with a truly yellowish tinge to his skin, my father lay flat, his head on a white pillow, smiling weakly, devouring me with his large brown eyes whenever I went to see him. “My rabbit, my treasure,” he said each time, “I’ll be back soon.” But he did not come home for at least two months, and I can still remember the names of the Metro stations between our stop at the rue de Longchamp (Metro Iéna) and the hospital—take the Montreuil line to Strasbourg St-Denis, then the Porte d’Orléans line to Châtelet–Les Halles, travel three stops on the Montrouge line to Port-Royal.

  In March, it was my turn, and my governess’s, to be sick. I came down with hepatitis, possibly contracted during my visits to the hospital. My governess fell ill with a bad bronchitis. While trying to keep her hat workshop going, my mother now turned to full-time nursing, putting me to bed in a corner of her own room, behind a large gold-and-black Chinese screen Uncle Sasha had brought her from the Far East. In fear that I would also contract one of my recurring attacks of bronchitis, she forbade my governess any visits and tended to both of us by herself. Aunt Sandra and Aunt Simone Monestier took turns coming for a few hours of the day so that Mother could continue bringing food and cheer to my father. (Unbeknownst to me, she was being ferried to the hospital almost daily by Alex, who read patiently in the car while she visited with her husband.) I have a cherished memory of those days spent behind Uncle Sasha’s screen, dozing, reading, and being comforted by the three women I most loved. And I believe that this was the first time that I sensed my mother’s potential for heroism and for great tenderness, the first time she truly awed me, the first time I began to give her my trust.

  At the end of April, just as I had recuperated enough to resume some activities without my governess, who was still in her sickbed, my father came home from the hospital. Moody and wasted, he was on a month’s convalescence leave from the Ministry of War. Barely two weeks after his return, the “drôle de guerre” ended, and World War II began in earnest. On Friday, May 10, at 4:31 A.M. French time, German Panzer divisions headed by General Heinz Guderian, who had pioneered the very technique of the Panzer attack, crashed through the frontier of Luxembourg. In the following forty-eight hours, they moved so swiftly across Belgium and Holland that by Monday they had pierced the rugged Ardennes region and crossed the Meuse river, terrains that France’s tragically incompetent High Command had thought impregnable to the Germans’ mighty tanks.

  Throughout the weekend, my gaunt, solemn father sat at his desk, pretending to work, answering my questions monosyllabically, keeping his radio blaring late into the night. Early on Monday the thirteenth—by this time Holland was two days away from capitulation—I went into his room and was surprised to see him in full military uniform. “But Papa,” I exclaimed, “you’re still on convalescence leave!” “I must go to the ministry,” he said. “I’ll let you know what happens.” He returned that afternoon, more somber than ever. His hands trembled terribly. My mother was out, delivering hats, and I followed him into his study. He locked the door behind us and slumped into an armchair. He bent over double, his face on his knees, and burst into tears. I ran to him, enfolding him in my arms. “They’ve turned me down!” he sobbed. “They say I’m too sick to fight, too sick to fly!” He fell to the ground and now began to sob uncontrollably, like a two-or three-year-old having a tantrum. I knelt on the floor next to him. I stroked his head, weeping also, whispering, “Papa, you’ll get stronger soon, you can fly again by next month.” My governess started pounding at the door, begging to be let in. “Leave us alone, Maria Nikolaevna!” he howled. He was now my own child, the little boy I’d always wanted. I held him in my arms, caressing his head, his cheek, sobbing with him. His familiar litany of insults resumed, admixed with his personal griefs: General Gamelin, General Weygand, a bunch of doddering idiots, fighting the Panzer units with their archaic World War I tactics. He’d been assigned to a seedy old desk at the Ministry of War, they wouldn’t let him go back to his squadron, just when his country needed him the most they wouldn’t let him fight.

  I kept looking at the sunny street outside, rue de Longchamps, thinking of the safe, beloved landmarks of my childhood: Just to the left, a few buildings away, was the Musée Guimet, where Father often took me to look at beautiful Tang vases and his favorite Sung Dynasty landscapes; a few blocks to the right, down the avenue d’Iéna, the Trocadero, with its sweeping view of the Tour Eiffel…. “The idiots won’t let me fight,” my father continued to howl. “They won’t allow me to fight on!” “Papa, you’re getting stronger by the day, maybe by next week you can fly.” I took my role as protector and nurturer with gravity and pride, and yet I was desperate for another adult to be there, to comfort him alongside me, to help.

  Finally, I heard the key turn in the outside door, my mother’s hurried steps toward my father’s study, her brief whispered conversation in Russian with my governess. It was she, this time, knocking at the door. “Ouvres, Bertrand,” she pleaded. “Bertrand, chéri, ouvres la porte!” Still sobbing, he half stumbled, half crawled to the door. Still sobbing, he fell into her arms. “Mon chéri,” she whispered, “mon pauvre chéri.” “Dial Jasmin 34-10, Frosinka,” she told me, “tell her to come right away.” It was Aunt Sandra’s number—I, too, knew it by heart. She was in, and I hardly needed to explain—she would be over as fast as possible. I returned to my parents. The three of us remained in one another’s arms, weeping together, weeping, I suppose, about the shambles of the world as we had known it, and through my haze of tears I felt a sudden rush of gratitude for the fact that the three of us were, after all, a family.

  Then my mother began to be practical. She made my father lie down on his bed, took off his shoes, loosened his collar. Sandra arrived. The two women briefly huddled by the window—it was clear, they agreed, that he was “on the verge of a breakdown.” My father sobbed on uncontrollably, lying on his side now, his head buried in his hands. Sandra dialed the phone. Within twenty minutes, our beloved Dr. Simon, the family doctor who had taken care of all of us since my infancy, was by my father’s side, giving him an injection.

  My father is sedated now, lying flat on his back. Dr. Simon, an Alsatian Jew of angelically even temper much teased in the family for his boundless optimism, has joined us and sits at his bedside, quietly talking to his friend. “Your job at the War Ministry is just as important as any you could have at the front, mon vieux,” he is saying. “You’re in an elite unit of Air Force Intelligence, you can help them as few people can.” “They’ve crossed the Meuse, and they’re heading towards Sedan,” my father moans. “Do you know what that means? The game is over.” “Bertrand, dear Bertrand, don’t always be so pessimistic,” Dr. Simon whispers. “We’ll reconstitute a new front any time now.” “Their Panzers will go through Belgium in three days, and then they’ll start marching on Picardy,” my father insists, now beginning to stifle some yawns. My mother and my aunt still stand at the window, whispering. “Depressions: extremely common after jaundice,” my aunt says assertively.

  My father was right, as he usually was in the realm of political issues. In the fortnight following that family reunion, as my father grew resigned, accepted medication, and slowly resumed his desk work at the Ministry of War, German forces made short shrift of Belgium, forcing its capitulation within a fortnight of Holland’s. Having bolted acr
oss France’s Département du Nord, they had necessitated the heroic evacuation, at Dunkirk, of more than 330,000 Allied troops. At the end of May, German forces obliged the French Army to reconstitute its front at the Somme River, a two hours’ drive north of Paris. And on June 6 they broke through that last defense line, causing such panic among French troops that generals, their originally scheduled maneuvers made impossible by the tide of civilians clogging the country’s roads, ceased to accept commands from the General Staff, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers of all ranks abandoned their regiments to seek refuge in their homes throughout France. By June 8, as German forces speedily approached the capital, having overwhelmed what was recently considered to be continental Europe’s most powerful army, it was clear that the French High Command had been taken ignominiously by surprise; that it had totally misjudged both the extent of the Panzer divisions’ effectiveness and the angle of the Germans’ approach; that the word “débâcle,” which came into historic usage that summer, was carrying its full weight of associations—of national shame, of communal failure, of widespread social disintegration.

  On the evening of Sunday, June 9, my father came home from the Ministry of War, where he had been working around the clock, to tell my mother that she and I must get on the road to Tours as early as possible the following morning. The government was being evacuated to Tours at dawn; he was going to sleep on a cot at his office. At 8:00 P.M., he stood at the door of our flat, his little suitcase in hand. “Á très bientôt, mon trésor,” he said as he embraced me. “Occupes toi bien d’elle,” he whispered to my mother as he embraced her tenderly in turn, “Take good care of her.” His eyes were filling with tears. Hers were, too. He fled down the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  Early the following morning, Aunt Sandra arrived to see us off, tearful, sentimental, but efficient. “Bozhe moi, dear God,” she knew all too much about exiles, she said with many sighs. Two decades ago, she’d lost her beloved daughter, lost her husband, lost all she possessed during her long exodus out of Russia. However much she loved us, she couldn’t face another exile. She helped my mother finish packing, sent me to the charcuterie to get some cold food for our trip—it was the first time I was allowed to go out of the house and do an errand by myself, without an adult. My governess, barely recovering from her bronchitis, still coughing and running fevers at night, sat glumly in an armchair, agreeing with Aunt Sandra’s feelings about exile: No, she, too, couldn’t face one again. It was time to leave. The concierge’s husband came up to carry our luggage. How tenderly, lovingly my mother held my hand as we slowly descended the staircase, waving, blowing kisses to the two forlorn women above us who, along with Aunt Simone and Babushka, had been my principal mentors since infancy.

  TEN

  The Debacle

  As my mother and I left Paris on the gloriously sunny morning of June 10, 1940, we became part of a panic-stricken caravan, the surreal mayhem of which haunts me to this day. The road to Tours, the destination of most Parisians, was clogged with every possible invention that could move on wheels. Amid a cacophonous din of bleating horns, fire trucks, ambulances, ice-cream vendors’ vehicles, funeral carriages, municipal street-sweeping trucks, tourist buses racily labeled “Paris La Nuit,” even wheelbarrows and prams mingled with the chic limousines, sports cars, family sedans all heading south toward the Loire, where, so deluded gossip had it, French troops might still “reconstitute a front.” Barely moving at the pace of a human stride—it was taking three days to travel a distance usually covered in three hours—these vehicles, crammed with children, women of all ages, old men, and boys under eighteen, were surmounted by an astounding variety of hastily assembled personal possessions. Tied onto their roofs amid mounds of sheets, blankets, and mattresses were birdcages, bicycles, cradles, sewing machines, saucepans and various other cooking utensils, collapsible tents, cuckoo clocks. Swarming amid the vehicles, at times totally stopping their advance, large bands of haggard, desperate-eyed soldiers searching for their retreating units stumbled alongside hordes of pedestrian refugees who carried their possessions on their backs: They were part of the million and a half citizens who had taken to the roads in the past four weeks, in the wake of one of the most catastrophic defeats in military history.

  This torrent of humanity registered no ill will and little rage, simply a shared despair and benumbed stupor. For few members of that exodus knew where their loved ones were. It was as if a monstrous explosion had blown hundreds of thousands of families into fragments, scattering them all over the landscape, causing the ones left behind to phone every possible hostelry in the country and to send ads to the papers such as “Jules Monnet, your loving parents are in Auxerre.” As our tiny Peugeot wheezed southward in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, we knew that throughout France hundreds of thousands of our compatriots were searching for loved ones and wondering about their survival, with an anxiety equal to ours.

  My mother’s anxiety was threefold: By the end of the first afternoon, she knew that given the pace of the Germans’ advance, there was little chance that we would reach Tours in less than three days; she was realistic enough to realize that my father’s ministry—which had left at 4:00 A.M. in a special government caravan, plowing its way through the traffic with horns blaring—might already have left Tours by the time we reached the city and gone on to yet another southward destination. She was equally anxious about Alex’s whereabouts—he had left Paris on the eighth, Mamasha in tow, with the intention of winding his way to the south of France; but as a Russian Jew with a Nansen passport, he was particularly vulnerable to persecution by the notoriously anti-Semitic French police. Moreover, as we sputtered toward Tours at the rate of five kilometers an hour amid the horrendous traffic, our engine constantly stalling, I was aware that notwithstanding the kisses she kept blowing me to boost my spirits, Mother was very worried about whether we could even make it to Tours ahead of the Nazis. So to cheer her up, I kept humming my favorite ditty of the season, “We’re gonna hang our linen on the Siegfried line…if the Siegfried Line’s still there.”

  For three days, we slept in the car, living on the reserves of bread, water, and hardboiled eggs we had brought from Paris, scrounging occasional scraps of fruit in local cafés. Our destination was Villandry, a Renaissance château a few miles from Tours that is graced with one of France’s loveliest gardens. It belonged to a friend of my mother, Isabelle Carvallo de la Bouillerie, a woman of considerable mettle and generosity who had recently worked alongside my mother at the Auxiliaire Social, an organization in Paris that sheltered refugee children. Villandry, originally built by François I’s minister of finances, who had served as French ambassador to Rome, has long been looked on as the ideal prototype of the Renaissance château. It has been owned by only two families since the sixteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth century was bought by a wealthy Spanish-born eye doctor, Joachim Carvallo, who saved it from destruction and designed its famous boxwood plantings, drawing inspiration from Renaissance gardens. In May 1940, when the German Blitzkrieg began, his daughter Isabelle had opened a center for refugee children on the Villandry grounds. In recent weeks she had also begun to share her château with various Parisian acquaintances who were fleeing, and we had the luck of being included in this group.

  It was upon arriving at Villandry that my mother received the first of several desperate letters Alex was to write her there throughout June, before he was even sure that she was there. He had had his own share of troubles during his exodus from Paris with his mother. Having left Paris two days earlier than we had, with several canisters of gasoline in his trunk, he managed to travel southwestward on the smallest back roads, having been ordered off the main thoroughfares early on by a French officer who put a revolver to his head. Alex and Henriette had finally reached Royan, on the Atlantic coast, where my mother’s sister, Lila, whose marriage was happy enough but who had always had a crush on Alex, had also fled. Under his mask of suave courtesy and charm, Alex was a
very controlling man, all too given to violent jealousy; and this first letter, written on June 11, already reflects a certain rancor, which would color our family relations for a long time to come: Heedless of the political crisis, he resented the fact that my mother’s devotion to me and her dutifulness toward my father’s decisions had led her to act independently of him.

  My beloved,

  You of course are so preoccupied that you scarcely have time to think of me. Lila is just as sharp-witted as you are, and thanks to her we found two rooms in a very agreeable villa—I am constantly gripped by the terrible sense that I’ve lost you. I think of you ceaselessly, and it seems that you were indifferent to our separation, and I suffer from that idea. Perhaps I’m mistaken, and my feelings are the result of solitude and loneliness. Beloved, write me as soon as you can that you love me passionately and will love me whatever happens. This is all a lesson for me: I’m learning that I need you more than you need me.

  Quickly write me to tell me I’m wrong…. To spend 24 hours a day with mamasha is very hard. With Lila it’s just as difficult because she’s looking for something other than what I can give her—but she is very sweet. I roam from café to café like all the other refugees and think of you, everyone finds me sad—and I am—because…I was already outside of your life—and your plans for a while had been made without me. My love I adore you write to me quickly before I despair—