Léon and Louise

by Alex Capus

  ‘Fair enough. At least we won’t be turning over those records to the Nazis. It’s a humanitarian act.’

  ‘Humanitarian my eye!’ the young man said, flicking his cigarette end into the Seine. ‘They want to save their card index, that’s all.’

  ‘From the Nazis?’

  ‘Yes, because they’re afraid they’ll mess up their nice, tidy Room 205, seeing they can’t even speak French.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s typical.’

  ‘Room 205 is even keener on being tidy than the Germans.’

  The Service des Étrangers in Room 205, the department responsible for supervising foreigners and refugees, had become notorious in France and far beyond its borders as the ‘Ministry of Shame’. It comprised a team of junior civil servants whose sole job it was to spy on, supervise and bully all the refugees who were seeking asylum in the home of human rights and make it as hard as possible for them to obtain permanent residency. Originally established from the worthiest of motives to assist the human jetsam of the First World War, the Service des Étrangers had mutated over the years, seemingly of itself and without outside help, into a Moloch that fed on the blood of those it should really have protected, its supreme aim being to know all about anything and anyone that wasn’t one hundred per cent French.

  The grandest hotels in Paris and the shabbiest suburban boarding houses had to submit their guests’ registration forms to Room 205 every day. Every labour exchange had to report its foreign applicants, every judicial authority had to submit relevant information, and every anonymous informer received a ready hearing from conscientious officials who carefully entered every denunciation on an index card and filed it away for all time.

  There were millions of red index cards recording foreign residents’ addresses, millions of grey index cards that classified them by nationality, and millions of yellow index cards containing political information. Jews, communists and freemasons were listed in separate indexes. So numerous were the index cards that they had to be collated into central registers, which in turn were collated into one big, comprehensive register, and all these card indexes and registers were methodically stored in wooden boxes and suspension files kept on the ceiling-high shelves that lined every wall in the spacious office.

  Outside the door of Room 205 were some long benches polished to a high gloss by the trouser seats of hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews, German communists and Italian anti-fascists who had spent many hours, days and weeks tremulously hoping that their name would at last be called and they would be admitted to Room 205, where a junior civil servant, having eyed them suspiciously over the top of his glasses and consulted some red and grey cards, would pick up his rubber stamp and – please God – renew their resident’s permit for another week or month.

  The bells of Notre Dame had just struck half-past eight when a black Citroën Traction Avant pulled up on the Quai d’Orsay. The passenger door opened and out got Roger Langeron, the French capital’s prefect of police. Putting a megaphone to his mouth, he addressed the army of waiting men over the top of the car.

  ‘MESSIEURS, YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE. ALL POLICE JUDICIAIRE PERSONNEL ARE HEREBY ASSIGNED TO SPECIAL DUTIES UNDER THE PROVISIONS OF MARTIAL LAW. YOU ARE ALL TO PROCEED TO THE FIRST FLOOR BY WAY OF STAIRCASE F AND HOLD YOURSELVES IN READINESS IN THE PASSAGE OUTSIDE ROOM 205. KINDLY HURRY, THE GERMANS HAVE ALREADY REACHED COMPIÈGNE!

  At his young colleague’s side, Léon climbed Staircase F to the first floor and sat down on a bench in the passage. The door of Room 205 was open. Usually renowned for its cathedral hush and positively robotic working methods, the big office was as filled with noise and bustle as a flea market. Standing on tall ladders, men in oversleeves were removing card indexes from the shelves and handing them down to other men in oversleeves, who carried them over to a big central desk at which the prefect of police himself was seated. Having examined each card index in turn, he slid it to the left- or right-hand side of the desk. Those that went left were destined for immediate destruction, whereas those on the right were to be taken to a place of safety.

  Lined up on either side of the desk were two human chains for the removal of the card indexes. Running parallel to each other, they led out into the passage and down Staircase F to the ground floor, then out through the main entrance and across the Quai des Orfèvres to the banks of the Seine. The card indexes destined for disposal were taken a little way downstream and thrown into the river, where individual cards drifted away on the current like outsize autumn leaves; the material to be preserved was loaded into two specially requisitioned barges moored further upstream.

  Léon joined the chain responsible for jettisoning card indexes. For eight hours he stood on the steps passing thousands of folders and box files from hand to hand. Documentary evidence relating to millions of human lives floated away on the turbid waters of the Seine, there to disintegrate, dissolve and sink to the bottom of the river, where mud-eating invertebrates would ingest it, digest it, and reintroduce it to the life cycle.

  Urged to hurry by their superiors, the members of the human chains did little talking. Room 205 had been cleared by the evening of the second day, and the last of the records were removed from the basement overnight. At half-past eight the next morning, exactly forty-eight hours after the operation began, the barges cast off and disappeared under the Pont Saint-Michel, heading downstream for the unoccupied South of France by way of rivers and canals.

  Three days later, on Friday, 14 June – in other words, the day on which Louise sent him a first sign of life – Léon awoke long before dawn as usual. He lay there listening to the ticking of the alarm clock and his wife’s regular breathing until the morning light showing through the sun-bleached linen curtains changed from pale blue to orange and pink. Then he slipped out of bed, bundled up his clothes, and tiptoed out into the passage, inadvertently making a noise because some small change fell out of his trouser pocket. In the kitchen he lit the gas and put some water on, then washed and shaved at the sink. When he went to fetch the Aurore from the landing, he was surprised to find that it wasn’t lying on the doormat as usual. This had never happened before.

  For want of anything else to read, Léon took the last three days’ papers from the hall table and went back into the kitchen, where he opened the first of them and read an article he’d previously missed on sheep farming in the Outer Hebrides. Shortly before seven o’clock he buttered ten slices of bread for the whole family, his customary chore. The first to make a bleary-eyed appearance was his eldest son Michel, now sixteen and at secondary school. While Léon was pouring two cups of coffee, Yves, the next in age, tottered off to the lavatory.

  Léon put a saucepan of milk on the stove. A little later, when Yvonne came into the kitchen holding four-year-old Muriel in her arms and leading eight-year-old Robert by the hand, he found himself hemmed in between the stove and the sink. Having kissed his wife on the corner of the mouth and the two youngest children on the top of their heads, he took his second cup of coffee and retired to the armchair beside the living-room window, which had a nice view of the Rue des Écoles and the École Polytechnique.

  He had only just sat down when he caught sight of a soldier who had made himself comfortable on a bench in the little park outside. Blinking in the morning sunlight, he was eating an apple and a big slice of bread with his legs stretched out in front of him. His helmet was lying beside him on the bench, the butt of his rifle planted on the gravel path. A box camera was hanging from his neck by a strap, an absurdly large holster attached to his belt.

  ‘Yvonne!’ called Léon, retreating behind the curtain so as not to be seen from outside. ‘Please come and take a look.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That soldier over there.’

  ‘Yes, how odd.’

  ‘Don’t stand in front of the window.’

  ‘Where would he have got that apple?’

  ‘What about the apple?
’

  ‘At this time of year there isn’t an apple to be had anywhere in Paris. The new crop doesn’t come on the market till late July.’

  ‘I’m talking about his helmet and his uniform.’

  ‘Look, now he’s getting out another apple. And feeding bread to the pigeons – real white bread made with wheat flour.’

  ‘The uniform, Yvonne.’

  ‘The stuff we eat is like sawdusty cardboard – you can hardly call it bread – and that fellow’s feeding good bread to the pigeons. He’ll be eating meat, next. If we want meat we have to hunt squirrels in the Luxembourg Gardens.’

  ‘The squirrels have been exterminated, I heard.’

  ‘All the better.’

  ‘But forget about apples and squirrels, Yvonne. Look at his uniform.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s grey. Ours are khaki.’

  ‘But... that’s impossible!’

  ‘I’ll go to the baker’s and scout around.’

  The nearest two bread shops were shut, but a tour of the Latin Quarter left Léon in no doubt: the Wehrmacht had tiptoed into Paris in the course of that early summer’s night. Not a shot had been fired, not an order shouted or a bomb dropped. At dawn the Germans had simply materialized like some recurrent seasonal event – like the arrival of swallows from Africa at the end of May, or the Beaujolais nouveau with which landlords swindled tourists in the autumn, or the latest novel by Georges Simenon.

  As if it were the most natural thing in the world, they had introduced themselves into the urban scenery and were now standing around with their steel helmets and Mauser pistols, queueing up like tourists at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, sitting in the Métro, studying their Baedeker guides with Agfa cameras suspended from their necks in brown leather cases, and photographing each other’s grinning faces as they stood on their own or in groups outside Notre Dame and Sacré-Cœur.

  Battle-hardened Panzer grenadiers gallantly helped elderly ladies to board buses, tipsy infantrymen loosened their belts as they ate steak and frites in the pavement cafés, complimented the chefs and tipped the waiters generously. Dapper Luftwaffe officers, who might just as well have been fobbed off with tomato juice, exhausted the stocks of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and many of the newcomers, being Austrians, spoke remarkably good French. All that rendered the occupying power unpleasantly conspicuous was its insistence on holding a big parade in the Champs-Élysées, of all places, at precisely half-past twelve every day.

  ‘They’re all over the place,’ Léon whispered to Yvonne when he returned with two baguettes. He kept his back to the children so as not to alarm them. ‘I saw two sitting in a car in the Place Champollion and one drinking coffee on the terrace in the Rue Valette. There are huge swastika flags hanging from the Panthéon and the Sorbonne. On the way back I actually bumped into one coming round a corner, and you know what? He apologized. In French, what’s more.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Yvonne.

  Léon shrugged his shoulders. ‘I must go to the lab. The children must go to school.’

  ‘You’re going to work?’

  ‘Duty calls, Yvonne. We already discussed this.’

  ‘We could escape.’

  ‘Where to, Cherbourg? For one thing, the Germans will soon be everywhere, if they aren’t already. For another, the police would promptly arrest me – the French police, too, not even the Germans. Thirdly, if I went to jail you and the children would be out on the street within a month, starving.’

  ‘We could hide here in the flat.’

  ‘Where? Under the sofa?’

  ‘Léon...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s think it over.’

  ‘What’s to think about? There’s nothing to think about. You can only think things over if you’ve got some information, and we don’t know a thing. We can’t see or hear anything, we’ve no idea what’s going on. We don’t know what happened yesterday, and we know even less about what’s going to happen tomorrow.’

  ‘At least we can see a bit,’ said Yvonne, pointing out of the window.

  ‘The soldier, you mean? A Wehrmacht soldier eating two apples, one after the other, and enjoying the sun? All right, what does that tell us?’

  ‘That the Germans are here.’

  ‘Yes, and we can also hazard a guess that the fellow will get diarrhoea if he eats a third apple. But apart from that it tells us nothing. We don’t know how numerous the Germans are and what they intend to do, settle in or move on, or whether the British will come to our aid or the Germans have already landed in England, or if Paris will be spared or razed to the ground. We don’t know a thing. Events have overtaken us, that’s all. There’s no point in thinking or arguing about them.’

  ‘But things could get dangerous here. For us and the children.’

  ‘They could, but blindly rushing off somewhere is almost certainly the most dangerous thing we could do. That’s why the children must clean their teeth and wash their faces. I’m off. There’s a lot of work waiting for me at the lab.’

  At that moment a loudspeaker van came down the street. On behalf of the German authorities, it informed the city’s inhabitants that they were to remain in their homes for the next forty-eight hours, and that France would observe German time from now on, so all clocks should be put forward one hour.

  13

  Léon didn’t find it unpleasant that his internal clock woke him one hour later than usual. The Aurore wasn’t lying on the doormat the next morning either, so his time at the kitchen table would have dragged in any case. It felt good for once, not roaming around in the dark like a zombie but lying in bed for as long as his wife and children in the unaccustomed silence that had descended on the city. Besides, the two days’ house arrest decreed by the occupying power was long enough in any case. The Le Gall family devoted them to reading, eating and playing cards. Michel, the eldest boy whose present resemblance to the boy Léon had been in the days of his boat trips on the English Channel was positively absurd, spent hours twiddling the radio’s tuning knob in search of news when all the stations were playing nothing but music. Léon and Yvonne sought to disguise their concern by being exaggeratedly cheerful and aroused the children’s suspicions by trying to kiss them at the most inappropriate moments.

  Whenever Léon went to the window, Michel abandoned the radio and came and stood beside him with his hands clasped behind his back, chewing his lower lip in silence and looking down at the street. Now and then a German army lorry would drive past, or sometimes an ambulance, hearse or police car, and once even a sewage tanker going about its indispensable business.

  It was so quiet outside that, when a patrol marched down the street, the tramp of boots could be heard through closed windows. And because, after two months of almost uninterrupted sunshine, the sky that day was veiled in cloud, the birds had fallen silent as if in obedience to German orders.

  Every two or three hours, Léon would leave the confines of the flat and sneak downstairs. He ventured out on to the pavement and peered right and left, listened to the silence and sniffed the air. But he never saw, heard or smelt anything that conveyed even the least idea of what was happening in the outside world.

  On the third morning, house arrest was over and Paris came to life again. At dawn Léon wondered which would be wiser, to go to work as prescribed or spend another day in the haven of the flat. He could hear a faint hum of motor traffic and the occasional clip-clop of horses’ hoofs. So as not to wake Yvonne, he tiptoed to the window and drew the curtain aside. A taxi drove past, followed by a Léclanché van and a woman on a bicycle. A hairy youth in a sleeveless vest trundled a mobile vegetable stall over the cobblestones.

  But there was still no evidence of the war. No dark clouds of smoke stained the sky, no armoured vehicles were standing in the Rue des Écoles, the magnolias were flowering in the park across the way, and there were no trenches, soldiers or signs of combat and devastation to be seen.

  ‘The Germans are m
aking themselves invisible,’ thought Léon. ‘Either that or they’ve moved on. It doesn’t look dangerous out there, anyway.’

  He decided to go to work, calculating that it would probably be more dangerous for him to stay at home and risk a court martial for dereliction of duty. That morning he shaved a trifle more carefully than usual and put on clean underwear and his new tweed suit; if anything happened to him he wanted to cut a good figure in hospital, prison or the morgue. He wrote a note for Yvonne while drinking his coffee in the kitchen, then took his hat and coat from the hooks in the hall and closed the front door quietly behind him.

  On the ground floor he noticed that Madame Rossetos’ glass door was ajar. He paused to listen but heard nothing, so he sidled nearer and called the concierge’s name. Her gloomy abode was deserted. In one corner stood a broom, and beside it a pail with a floorcloth draped over it to dry. Where once Sergeant Rossetos’ photograph had hung, the floral wallpaper displayed a conspicuous pale rectangle. The air smelt of braised onions and pungent cleaning fluids, and Madame Rossetos’ eternal apron was hanging on a hook behind the door. On the stove, which was unlit, lay a big bunch of keys and beside it a handwritten note:

  Please destroy all incoming mail unopened, I rely on your discretion. You can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned, you idle, self-important nit-pickers. Mesdames and Messieurs, please accept my most respectful salutations.

  Josianne Rossetos,

  concierge of No. 14

  Rue des Écoles from

  23 October 1917 to

  6 a.m. on 16 June 1940.

  No swastika flags were hanging up outside the Quai des Orfèvres and no SS men lounging around in the passages. The laboratory, where everyone had turned up for work, was its usual hive of silent industry.

  To Léon’s surprise, the refrigerator was overflowing with tissue samples – something that had never happened before in his fourteen years’ service. When he commented on this to a colleague, the latter shrugged and pointed out that a clothes locker had been converted into a makeshift refrigerator, and that this was also chock-full.