Confidant (9781101603628)

by Gremillon, Helene; Anderson, Alison (TRN)

  But I made her pay for it. She shouldn’t have lied to me.

  It took me a while to recover from the birth. I was very weak. Madame M. never left our room. As in the beginning, we were always in the same room, but I didn’t paint anymore and she didn’t read. We looked at Louise. We had become silent enemies. When I was breastfeeding, I could feel her jealous gaze upon me, but at least she could not steal those moments from me. For the rest, I had no choice. No choice but to let her change the baby. Take her in her arms. Rock her. Whisper into her ear. Call her ‘my baby’. She took her out for walks while I stayed in bed; I couldn’t get up.

  I knew I wanted to go away with Louise, to go home. I no longer felt any guilt whatsoever. This was my child. But I couldn’t tell Madame M. that we’d made a mistake, that you cannot separate a child from its mother, that it is against the laws of Nature. She wouldn’t have listened to me. She was beyond that. I had to go on pretending, had to keep on coping. Staying submissive, particularly as she must not suspect what I intended to do. I just needed long enough to regain my strength. I would find a way, sooner or later, to run away with Louise.

  But I waited too long.

  I was only just beginning to be able to walk again without getting tired. She came into my room one morning, as usual, at feed time. Louise was nearly a month old. She took her from my arms and went out. I followed her. The door to her room was locked. Louise was crying. I knew how she cried and this was not her usual crying. I knocked. No answer. Only Louise, crying louder and louder. I began to be afraid. I called out to Sophie, to get her to do something. I searched every room for her and that was when I went into the bathroom.

  It was horrible. My cat Alto was floating in the bath, dead. Madame M. had killed him. Drowned, strangled, I don’t know, the water was full of blood. I ran back to her bedroom. I begged her to open the door. Louise had stopped crying. I was so terrified she might have hurt her. I wanted to go for help, but the front door was also locked.

  Suddenly I heard her voice behind me. ‘Go away! You have no business here anymore.’ She was at the top of the stairs. She was blocking my way. I asked her what she had done with my baby. She answered that she hadn’t done anything to my baby because I had no baby. She was sincerely sorry for me, she hoped that some day I might have a child of my own, but in the meanwhile she was asking me to stop harassing her. She said I was raving mad and had only one thing in mind, to kidnap her child. It would be better if I left, now. For everyone’s sake. She said ‘everyone’ in such a determined tone of voice that it was as if there were puppet strings tugging me and I left the house in spite of myself.

  I had finally grasped that this woman would rather kill Louise than lose her. I started down the street. I had to get away from the house. Away from her gaze, in case she was looking out the window. Do not provoke her. Let her calm down. I went round the corner and sat on a bench to regain my senses.

  But right there in front of me I saw soldiers with black boots and green gloves. This couldn’t be, they couldn’t be here. I followed them and found myself on the Champs-Elysées. It was as if I could not awaken from my nightmare. Everywhere there were tanks, lorries, armoured cars belonging to the Wehrmacht. They were setting up machine guns at every crossroads. Cavalrymen and foot soldiers spilling onto every street. This couldn’t be them: the newspapers had described the soldiers as puny, sickly, poorly dressed. These soldiers were strapping lads—proud, handsome, kitted out with gleaming weapons and new leather. But I recognised their metallic language, with its sharp accentuation. The Germans had arrived. Paris was occupied. And she hadn’t told me. I looked at them, wide-eyed. Absurd tourists: they were taking photographs. I thought they were going to arrest me. But they weren’t even looking at me. I was the only one with my head up who was not in uniform. The rare passers-by I encountered hurried on their way, staring at the ground. I don’t know how I managed not to collapse. I wanted so badly just to turn round and go and fetch Louise.

  I walked down the avenue. I turned onto the Pont de la Concorde. I crossed the Seine. Before me, a dozen German soldiers had climbed up onto the roof of the Palais-Bourbon. They had unfurled an immense banner, Deutschland siegt an allen Fronten. I didn’t understand what it meant, but in any case, I didn’t like the sound of it. I took the Boulevard Saint-Germain. They were already nailing up all their signs in German, to show directions. Soldiers, like monkeys, were up hanging their Nazi flags. Black, white, red, swastikas were fluttering everywhere. Some of them were immense, hanging from a roof and reaching down to the ground. I could no longer see the façades. Paris, the city without walls. The swastika made me think of a labyrinth, where every way out was blocked off, but I went on walking. I saw people in their apartments, their noses against the windows, terrified. I made my way through the city like a feeble robot. Boulevard Raspail. French kepis and helmets were attached like sinister trophies to the bonnets of German cars. I came upon some prisoners but I did not dare look at them. I was afraid I might recognise someone. The sun was scorching. I would have liked to stop and take a deep breath, but I hardly dared breathe at all. I sat down frequently to regain my strength. The aeroplanes made me dizzy. Motorcars drove by with loudhailers shouting that anyone found in the street after eight p.m. would be executed. Rue des Plantes. Suddenly there were no more road signs, no more flags, no more Germans hurrying everywhere, just emptiness, silence in the deserted streets, closed shutters. If they had not yet had time to mark their territory, they were here all the same. Filthy dogs. Rue de la Sablière. 3. 14. 32. 46. I don’t know how I managed to find Alberto’s studio. 46, rue Hippolyte-Maindron. Perhaps the puppet strings, once again. One day, she had shown me on the map where he lived. I had gone that way several times, in my imagination, and now I went down the little passageway into the tiny courtyard. I wanted to tell Alberto everything. I thought he of all people would believe me, and that he would help me to get Louise back. He knew Madame M. well; he would make her see reason. But he wasn’t there.

  I don’t know how long I waited there, lying on his doorstep. Two days. Three days. He woke me up, shaking me. He rushed into his studio like a madman and fell to the ground, scratching at the dirt. He had buried his statues. The ones he cared for the most. They were still there. He was so relieved, he had seen so many houses that had been ransacked. He was sure it was thanks to me. He didn’t ask me what I was doing there. It was as if it were normal. As if I had come to lie down outside his door to keep watch over his treasures. Like a good dog. He was too upset by what he had just experienced to ask me any questions.

  They had left Paris at the last minute. When it became too dangerous to stay. When there was no longer any doubt that the Germans were about to enter the city. He had taken his bicycle and left with Diego, his brother. They wanted to reach Bordeaux and find a ship for America. But it was chaos on the roads. Thousands and thousands of people were fleeing. Stukas were flying overhead. They made it to Etampes just after an attack. All the buildings were rubble. People were screaming. There were bits of bodies everywhere and an entire coach-load of children burnt to death. They didn’t stop. They kept on pedalling through the pools of blood spilled along the road. Everywhere there was panic. Lying in a ditch, in the middle of a throng of refugees, Alberto was no longer afraid to die. The others around him gave him courage, he who had worried so often about death. If someone had to die, he was prepared to do so, instead of someone else. In four days they had covered only three hundred kilometres. They followed the general movement and headed away from the road to Bordeaux. They arrived in Moulins, but the next afternoon the Germans occupied the city. It was all over, escape was no longer possible, so Alberto decided to return to Paris immediately. If he was going to be a prisoner, he might as well be one in his own studio. The return journey was even more horrific. On the road there were cars, corpses, piles of abandoned luggage, a bearded man’s severed head, a woman’s arm with a bracelet of green stones sti
ll around her wrist, the bloated carcasses of horses. The stench was unbearable. They had spent the first night in a field near the road; the smell of bodies was so strong that they could not sleep. They set off again and found me sleeping outside the door. That was it. So what was I doing there?

  The question had come too late. All I could think of was what they had told me.

  Had Maman bought an emerald green bracelet?

  Had Papa let his beard grow?

  I was panicked. And anyway, what could I tell him after all the horrors he had just described? ‘As for me, I haven’t seen a single dead body. But I did just get thrown out by your friend, who kept me locked up for six months and neglected to tell me that the Germans were invading, you see, “It wouldn’t be good for the baby . . . ” I wasn’t aware of anything going on, the only thing that mattered was my baby.’ ‘What baby?’ ‘Ah, yes, what baby! Well, the baby I made for her, for goodness’ sake! Her name is Louise. But if you go and see her, she will tell you that it’s her child, not mine, that I am completely mad and that I am trying to take it from her, that I’ve always been jealous of her. And if you ask around, all her friends, everyone, will tell you that I’m lying, that they saw she was pregnant all right.’

  I couldn’t tell him. What if he didn’t believe me? I closed my eyes. If the Germans had just landed, perhaps I hadn’t given birth. Perhaps it was all shock. A traumatic experience. The discrepancy between my sensations and everyone else’s was so great that I had begun to question my own experience. But the pain in my breasts was proof that yes, Louise did exist. So what should I have done? Show Alberto that my breasts were running with milk? Open my thighs so that he could see not the bloody roads he had just fled along, but a sight that was unsavoury all the same. To be honest, I didn’t even think of it. Had Maman bought an emerald green bracelet? Had Papa let his beard grow? I had to get home, as quickly as possible.

  I asked Alberto to lend me his bicycle. But he didn’t want me to go on my own. It was too dangerous, and I was so pale. Did I feel all right?

  How could he know that I no longer felt any pain. That I wouldn’t see a thing. Not even the pigs rummaging through the dead bodies. That I wouldn’t be afraid of anything. That my daughter had been taken from me, and my parents might be dead. I waited until he was asleep and then I fled. I would return his bicycle to him some day. He needed it less than I did. He had found his statues. I had to find my parents.

  Louise was born on the sixteenth of May 1940.

  I was born on the twenty-eighth of June 1940.

  I was terrified these letters might be about me.

  But my father had not been a journalist, and after the war he took over a printing press.

  It was true that my grandparents had died before I was born, but I was not the only person on earth who did not know her grandparents. My child would not know hers, either.

  And above all I had a brother, my beloved Pierre, the finest proof of all that my mother was not infertile.

  I was having dinner with Nicolas that evening, seeing him again for the first time after so many weeks. I would tell him this story; he’d have a good laugh at me. You’re forever making up stories, he would say.

  Would I find the courage to tell him that these days, it was more like I was making a child?

  I would not be able to hide it from him much longer, my baggiest sweaters would soon no longer be baggy enough. If he was hoping to bed a woman with a flat stomach, he was bound to be disappointed. For men, pregnancy means, first and foremost, the body of a woman who is now beyond their reach.

  My father was sitting in the kitchen. When I came in, he sprang to his feet, but it wasn’t me he had been expecting. Maman had disappeared. He had been all round the village and had not found a trace of her. He was desperate. She must have fled, like the others. When he came home everything was upside down; those fleeing had ransacked everything, even the rabbit hutches. He had been back in N. for two weeks.

  On the third of June 1940, the guards had thrown the inmates—including my father—into the prison courtyard. The government didn’t want them to fall into German hands. The Germans would have released them for sure. Ever since the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Communists had been in the Boches’ good books. They were being moved to another prison, they had to walk quickly, the guards were hitting them, shouting at them. It was late morning, they were on their way through Paris, when a guard suddenly pushed my father out of the group and told him to get the hell out of there and fast, opportunity never knocks twice at anyone’s door. They had let him go, and he still could not fathom why, but he was free, that was all that mattered.

  His story made no sense to me at all. Not for one instant had I imagined that my parents might become separated. That Maman might be one of those corpses I had pedalled past as fast as I could in my haste to get home.

  ‘Your parents are fine.’ Madame M.’s news had never varied. Jacques too was a filthy liar: supposedly he’d been looking out for them.

  If she had told me my father was in prison, I would have come home immediately to be with Maman. She knew that. Nothing could have stopped me. Neither she nor the pregnancy.

  I had been right to find their silence odd. I had thought my father was being resentful; he was a prisoner. I had thought that Maman must be spending her days defending me. But she was struggling with herself, to keep from writing to me, not to spoil ‘my stay in Collioure’, which she imagined must be wonderful. She must have kept telling herself that my coming home sooner would not bring back her husband. That is why she hadn’t written. She figured it would not surprise me unduly. My father had been very clear on the matter the day I left.

  Now Madame M.’s lies were revealed to me in all their monstrous cruelty. The trouble she had gone to in order to have Louise left me in no doubt as to the trouble she would go to in order to keep her. The prospect terrified me. My father a prisoner. The Germans victorious. Paris occupied. What else had she hidden from me? What else was I about to discover?

  But my father, too, had lied to me. After the Pact, he swore to me that he had left the Party. Why hadn’t he kept his promise? He would not have been arrested. Maman would not have disappeared. He would have protected her. I suddenly started screaming at him. Stalin, Stalin, all he’d cared about was Stalin. He must be happy now that Stalin’s new comrades might have killed Maman! Oh sorry, perhaps one ought to see that as an honour, after all?

  ‘Hold your tongue!’

  My father slapped me and dragged me by the hair over to his night table. He opened the drawer. His Party card was there, torn into pieces.

  ‘I didn’t lie to you. I told the gendarmes those days were over, but they just laughed at me and said I couldn’t fool them, just tearing up a card didn’t mean a thing. Besides, they didn’t give a toss what I was today, I’d been a filthy Red, a traitor to the homeland, that was enough. That’s how it happened! Defeatist words. Two years of prison without remission, a fine of two thousand francs. There was nothing I could do to keep those bastards from carting me off. And all because at the café I’d said that the blokes on the Maginot line were good-for-nothing layabouts who’d rather play a game of cards than work . . .’

  My father suddenly stopped talking. Given the way he was looking at me, I prayed he’d go no further. That he would not say what I knew he was going to say.

  ‘Christ almighty, girl, wake up! You think you have nothing to do with this whole bloody business? It’s all well and good to pin the blame on others, but don’t you go forgetting that if you hadn’t gone off with your la-di-da lady, your mother would never have ended up all on her own . . .’

  For the second time in my life I saw my father cry. The first time was when the Soviets signed the Pact.

  I had tried to bury my responsibility beneath his. But I knew it was my fault. I had left of my own fre
e will; he’d only got caught up in a political game he had no control over. Communism had become public enemy number one, and if you couldn’t go to war, you had to make a war at home.

  Night was falling.

  After a long while my father placed his hand on my shoulder. The electricity had been cut, so he was going to get a candle. Now that there were two of us, it was worthwhile using the candle. He said this and gave me one of those little winks of his I knew so well. Sadder than usual. But a wink all the same. And besides, we had to celebrate my return, there wasn’t much to eat, but we’d find something. He squeezed my shoulder, hard. It was his last act of tenderness towards me. He asked me if at least I’d been painting all this time, if I hadn’t already outgrown his easel. He thought I’d grown. I didn’t have the strength to reply. He didn’t have the strength to go and look for the candle. He sat back down and we stayed there. Without talking. In the dark. If he only knew how much I had grown. I could tell he knew nothing about Louise.

  I waited until he had gone to bed to open Maman’s trunk of material. If she hadn’t taken my letters with her, this is where I would find them, on top of the bolts of material, next to her Bible. There was no material anymore, no Bible; but my letters were there. Bound with a white ribbon. All of them, except the last one. The only one that was of the slightest importance. The one where I told her everything.