Mistress of the Ritz

by Melanie Benjamin

  This war has also bestowed upon Claude clarity, for he realizes something, now that Blanche is gone: Marriage is not defined by what we hope to gain, but by what we are willing to sacrifice. And Blanche sacrificed her whole self for him—her entire past. What did Claude sacrifice for her?

  Not a thing. And that will change, God willing, when she is returned to him.

  With a brisk “Au revoir,” followed by a whispered, “and God bless,” Claude takes his leave of Coco Chanel, and returns to his office.

  Blanche doesn’t know the names of the Germans who haul her out of her tiny cell day after day, drag her past all the others in their shadowy cells, all the others who won’t meet her gaze in case she doesn’t return. That’s a trick you learn real fast here: Don’t get too attached.

  All she cares about is the pain; her left shoulder, dislocated, she thinks, during an interrogation. She can recall only that she passed out when the Nazi slammed her against the cement wall, and when she awoke she found it no longer moves properly—she tries, sometimes, to raise her arm past her waist but the pain is so violent—icy hot javelins piercing her muscles—that she cries out.

  All she cares about is the hunger that is so constant it’s a part of her, just like the lice setting up camp on her head, the filth under her ragged fingernails. Sometimes, she pulls her thin woolen dress tight against her body, feels the ribs poking through the fabric and thinks, “Finally, I’m thin enough even for Chanel, that bitch.” And she longs to laugh, she tries to laugh, just as she used to. But she’s forgotten how.

  All she cares about is survival. Sometimes, when she can’t sleep, she tortures herself—as if the Nazis needed any help—remembering some of the things she’s said to Claude in the past, the petulant arguments, the whining. The times she threatened to leave. The times she did leave.

  Always, she came back, or he found her.

  It’s been months since she’s seen him. Is he even looking for her? She doesn’t know anything outside this terrible prison that echoes with the cries of those who are already lost but don’t realize it. Those who do don’t cry, for they know tears won’t save them.

  And the boots—those steel boots clomping up and down. The constant terror that they will stop outside your door; you wait for it, you know it’s coming, but still sometimes you trick yourself into saying, “Not today. Maybe today, they’re too busy for me. Maybe today, the Americans will come.”

  Today, they are not too busy for her. The familiar—dreaded—clomp clomp followed by silence. The torturous click of a key being inserted, a lock falling open. Then another clomp, hands under her armpits—if she had enough flesh still there to bruise, that tender area between upper arm and breast would be black and blue—and she’s on her feet, feet that no longer work reliably on their own, and she’s being dragged down the hall. There are grooves, she observes for the first time; grooves on the floor from so many people being dragged against their will.

  And now she’s in the office of yet another nameless Nazi—two of them, as a matter of fact—and this time, for the first time, there’s a gun to her head.

  “Give her up, Frau Auzello. Why do you play this game? You could be free. You could go home to the Ritz. You could have champagne and escargot tonight, a hot bath. What is this girl to you?”

  “I don’t know if Lily is a Jew,” she begins wearily; how many times does she have to say it?

  “All right, you win.”

  She raises her head, looks at him—denies the hope that begins to flower in her chest. “What do you mean?”

  “You win, Frau. We will forget this Lily, leave her be.”

  “You will—I—” How does one thank a German? Blanche can’t begin to form the words.

  “Yes. We will go after your husband instead. If you won’t give up your friend, we will arrest your husband. The esteemed Herr Auzello, director of the Ritz. We can find someone else to replace him. We’ll find something to charge him with—he’s been in prison once before. We’ll say we discovered he was responsible for leaving that light on during the air raid.”

  “But no! You can’t—I left that light on! I did it!”

  “So you say. But you won’t utter a word about your friend. How can we believe you? I think it’s better that we arrest your husband.” The man picks up the phone.

  Something breaks inside Blanche as he does—the years of pretending, of hiding, falling away like a great iceberg breaking apart, shattering everything within its vicinity, sheets and sheets of ice filling the water, causing great waves, deafening noise. Her heart is pounding so loudly—it must be weak from malnutrition, so complicating this moment of truth is the terror that she’ll drop dead before she can reveal it—before she can save Claude. She licks her parched, papery lips, she shouts—although it’s really a hoarse whisper; she no longer has the strength to shout—“It’s me! I’m the Jew! Not Lily. Forget about her—you want a Jew? Well, you have one—it’s me! Blanche Rubenstein! So leave him—leave Claude alone!” She’s weeping, wiping tears that aren’t there because she’s so dehydrated. “I’m the Jew—for God’s sake, don’t take Claude!” She drops to her knees, pleading.

  The two Germans exchange glances, eyebrows raised. One cracks a smile, then the other—and to her horror, they are laughing.

  “Why do you lie? You are Madame Auzello of the Ritz. The French don’t like Jews—the Ritz especially. Have you ever seen a Jew at the Ritz?” He guffaws.

  “But it’s true! I swear—my maiden name is Blanche Rubenstein, not Ross. My passport—it’s false. I changed it—I’m not from Cleveland but from the Upper East Side of Manhattan!”

  And she laughs, too; it’s contagious. She laughs, because it really was so easy. For Claude, she erased her past.

  For Claude, she reclaims it again.

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” she rasps. She looks up, searching the German, desperate to find something in his face she can recognize—humanity, pity. Even hatred will do at the moment. “I’m the Jew! I am—I’m Blanche Rubenstein!”

  “You are Blanche Ross Auzello, Catholic.” The other officer thumps her passport shut. “This is ridiculous. You’re trying to cover up for your little Jewish friend. I’m weary of this.” The officer drags her to her feet, pressing his gun against her temples, and the click of the safety being removed echoes in her brain, and she knows, with certainty, that she will die.

  “Don’t hurt Claude,” she whispers, but she will not close her eyes. She doesn’t want to see in their ugly faces their glee, their hunger. But she will not let them see her terror.

  Her body is shaking violently, she swallows, but there’s no saliva. There’s nothing left, nothing left of Blanche Rubenstein.

  Blanche Auzello.

  Then—the gun slides away from her flesh. Outside, there is commotion—boots running, the screech of brakes and rumble of motors, shouts. Her interrogators exchange looks, and for the first time since 1940, Blanche sees confusion, even fear, in Aryan eyes.

  They leave her, and she shuffles to the window, looking out at chaos: Nazis are everywhere, those gray-green uniforms dashing about, almost comically. Papers are flying through the air like snow; she glances up and sees them being tossed out of windows, some on fire, the orange sparks like fireflies.

  “Amerikaner! Amerikaner!”

  Americans!

  Blanche clings to the windowsill, peering out through the bars, and she’s desperate to believe what she sees, what she hears, but she can’t. Not yet.

  “Amerikaner!”

  The Americans—they must be here. Paris, thank God, is safe.

  But wait—over there! A shadowy corner between two buildings—she sees it. She sees her, Lily, she’s there, she’s wearing the blue dress Blanche last saw her in, a faded blue, like a bleached summer sky. Blanche can’t make out her body, only the blue of the dress, but it’s Lily, it
must be! Lily running, Lily flying; Lily fleeing, and Blanche wants to call to her, Blanche wants her to come back for her. But Lily must run away. She must have her chance.

  Blanche must give her friend that chance. Because she’s the reason Lily was arrested in the first place.

  “You!”

  One of the Boche is back in the room, and he’s hauling Blanche out the door, dragging her up some stairs, through another corridor, and she’s outside for the first time in months, but it’s too bright, it’s too big, there is no ceiling, no walls, she’s so exposed, she can’t even recognize fresh air, can’t let it in her sick lungs. She’s gasping, flailing, like a fish out of water.

  “You,” he repeats, shoving her against a brick wall stained with blood, and the gun is at her head once more.

  “I’m the Jew,” Blanche whispers again. “I’m the Jew.”

  “Leave her.” Another voice, one of the other officers from before, is striding past, his arms full of files and papers. “Leave her, crazy bitch—she’s blubbering nonsense. Let the Americans deal with her. Jews at the Ritz? Ha!”

  * * *

  —

  THEY’RE GONE. ALL OF them. Vanished, a cloud of dust the only sign they were here at all.

  No, no. That’s not true. There are signs everywhere—the black spider of the Nazi flag hanging from windows, the papers that didn’t burn. The crimson—almost black—bloodstains against walls where firing squads did their work. Stains on the ground, too. Stains everywhere.

  People—or are they ghosts?—everywhere, too. A few yellow stars on striped prison shifts—once-pretty girls who were kept here for the officers instead of being shipped out to one of the camps. But mostly there are no stars here at Fresnes; all the yellow stars are no longer in France, perhaps no longer in this world at all. Unless they were yellow stars like her; hiding in plain sight, forced to watch the horrors in a silence that protected as well as shamed.

  Prisoners are stumbling out of the buildings like sleepwalkers. They blink at the dazzling sun. Some crawl on their hands and knees, too weak to walk.

  Blanche is one of these sleepwalkers. She shuffles a few steps toward where she glimpsed that blue dress. She searches the gaunt faces, the bruised and battered and skeletal faces, for Lily.

  But then she looks for someone else. Even though he’s fifteen kilometers away, at the Ritz.

  “Claude! Claude!”

  “Auzello?”

  Blanche stops spinning, dizzy; there is someone at her feet. Someone who was once a man, but is now missing an arm, the stump not bandaged, just a shriveled black stick, and his eyes are bulging, his mouth is also swollen purple, and he can barely speak. His head has been shaved, but a few hairs have started to grow in—black, coarse. He is crumpled on the ground, his legs obviously broken; they are splayed like a marionette’s. He is only just alive, and for not much longer. Blanche can tell that he’s dying.

  She stoops, cradles him in her arms. “What did you say?”

  “Claude Auzello?” He has to pause, his breathing so labored Blanche can’t hear anything else. “Are you…Blanche?” The man is burning with fever. “He is…very brave.”

  “Who?” she asks urgently. “Are you talking about Claude?”

  But the man is unconscious, if not dead. And Blanche has to leave him there, leave him for someone else to bury. She has to get away from this place, before the Nazis return.

  The prisoners who can still stand look at one another, confusion in their red-rimmed, watery eyes. For the first time in a long time, no one is here to tell them what to do.

  Without a word, they shuffle toward the gates, which are flung open, fresh tire tracks scarring the gravel. A woman near Blanche falls, but she can’t help her. Blanche steps over her.

  Once, she stops to shake off her wooden clogs, which are so big she can’t even shuffle properly. Turning back, Blanche searches, one last time, for that blue dress. For Lily.

  But Lily is gone. Blanche tells herself that she has run away, far away, where she’ll be safe; that she is hiding somewhere, watching them all leave, making sure the Germans don’t come back. And that she’ll come find Blanche, later. Blanche has to tell herself that.

  Because she has to keep walking. She has to go home, to the Ritz.

  To Claude.

  “Monsieur Auzello, there is a call for you.”

  Claude nods, tamping down the flare of hope these words ignite. It’s been months, and every call has disappointed him. There’s no reason to think this one will be any different.

  But it is different. The hotel is different, the streets are, the very air—you can see the tension vibrating, were you the kind of person who claimed to see such things. Were you the kind of person like his Blanchette.

  “I’ll take it.” Claude follows the porter—François, that’s his name, he’s fairly new to the Ritz, just a youth, a schoolboy when the Boche first arrived—down the polished marble hall to his office, where there is a phone. A phone he knows very well is tapped by his guests.

  His guests are, shall we say, otherwise occupied today? Something has happened. Several officers departed last night without settling their bills. “Charge it to the Vichy government,” they barked, and Claude bowed politely and assured them he would, even though the Vichy government hasn’t got a franc—or more to the point, a Reichsmark—to its name.

  It does seem as if a terrible reckoning is upon them all. If the Americans are truly on the outskirts of Paris, as is rumored, it’s a reckoning for the Boche. But Claude can’t help but think it’s a reckoning for all who survived, as well.

  He grips the phone, ready to lift it to his ear. Ready to be told something—perhaps it’s nothing more than a fishmonger wanting to sell him his latest catch.

  Perhaps it’s something far worse.

  “Hello? This is Claude Auzello.”

  The voice on the phone is not the one he longs to hear. He doesn’t even recognize it; this is a stranger calling him. Which fills him with both terror, and hope.

  And then Claude hears her name.

  * * *

  —

  CLAUDE CRIES OUT WHEN he sees her. A ghastly notion of a woman slumped against a broken wooden fence by the side of the road.

  As soon as Chanel confirmed this was where she had been taken, Claude had gone to Fresnes himself, countless times. Bringing food, wine, pastries, chocolate—“A little present from the Ritz,” he always declared, removing the white linen towel with a flourish, revealing the delicacies. Every time, the basket was taken, greedily.

  Every time, he was turned away without seeing her, without even confirmation that she was inside.

  So despite the chaos everywhere—Claude heard gunfire, glimpsed an American tank down a side road, encountered citizens running to and fro, uncertain what to do; celebrate, hide, fight?—Claude leaped into one of the Ritz lorries and drove like a madman out of the city the moment he hung up the phone. She’d made it to a house about a kilometer from the prison, he was told. She could walk no farther.

  But this isn’t her, it can’t be her. It cannot be his Blanchette.

  This woman is forty pounds thinner than his Blanche. Her hair is patchy, gray. Her skin is drawn tight against her face. She is struggling for breath; he glimpses a broken tooth and nearly turns away. Her hands—once elegant, nails manicured and painted red—are shaking, the nails torn, and she makes no effort to stop the trembling. She is barefoot, her feet filthy and bleeding.

  But her eyes—those eyes, they could be Blanche’s.

  “Blanche!” He rushes to her, terrified to gather her in his arms, she is so fragile. And when he does put an arm about her shoulder, to help her into the car, she gasps with pain. “What did they do to you, my love?” He can’t help himself, even as he doesn’t want to know.

  Blanche shakes her head and closes her ey
es as soon as he carries her to the passenger seat.

  Claude grits his teeth at each jolt in the road, each honk of a horn, for there are still dangers about—Germans cut off from their regiments, left behind, cornered. Rumors of mines laid by the Resistance. Pockets of fighting still, even in the heart of the city.

  He hears himself chatter as he has never chattered before, sharing gossip, anything to fill the silence, stifle the fear, drown out her ragged breathing—“Von Dincklage left, and now Chanel is back, bereft. And unprotected.” Claude longs to hear Blanche’s voice; he wishes it so desperately that he would do anything—break out into an aria, tell her he’s shot Hitler himself—to have her speak, just once. Just to have her call him by his name. “And Arletty, too—her Nazi lover is gone. There are rumors that French citizens who—who collaborated, as they’re calling it—are being locked in the very prisons that the Germans have just left. The Americans will take the city tomorrow, I think. The Germans are almost all gone from the Ritz; only a few equerries remain. But we must be careful, still. For a little while. And then, my love, we will celebrate! Paris will celebrate as it’s never celebrated before!”

  Still she does not open her eyes, does not utter a sound. Again, Claude’s vocabulary is not equipped to deal with a situation, so he lapses into hopeless silence. Once, he thought French the most perfect language in the world; it had brought him his wife, hadn’t it? She used to say that she’d fallen in love with him because of his accent. But the war has shattered that illusion, too. For war doesn’t make sense in any language.

  Finally, they turn down the Place Vendôme, to the square. The Nazi trucks and tanks are gone although the swastika still hangs over the doorway. But they are home. His heart swells with joy.

  The Auzellos have returned to the Ritz.

  As Claude carries Blanche up the few stairs, he spies the entire staff gathered inside the front entrance; Blanche raises her head and sees them, too. She struggles, tries to take a deep breath but cannot—her hand flies to her rib cage as she gasps with pain—and she rasps, “Let me down, please.”