The Paper Girl of Paris

by Jordyn Taylor

  “I’m sorry, Adalyn. That must be so painful.”

  I let out a sigh. “It’s the most painful thing in the world, Luc. . . . Sometimes I feel so alone, because nobody knows who I really am. Not even my own family. Oh—this is my block, by the way. That’s my building over there. You shouldn’t come any further, in case someone sees.”

  We stop on the corner, under a streetlamp that hasn’t been lit since 1940. Not too far from here, Chloe is most likely stewing in her bedroom—if she isn’t spending the night at one of her friends’ houses. Maman and Papa are probably reading in the drawing room, both pushing down any troubling thoughts of the world outside the apartment.

  Luc steps in front of me and takes hold of my other hand. He pulls me in close, so my cheek rests upon his chest.

  “Don’t go,” I murmur into the fabric of his jacket.

  “I must,” he says, smoothing my hair. “But I want you to know, when you’re doing your work, and you feel like you’re all alone . . . I know who you really are, Adalyn. And no matter where I may be, know that if I am breathing, then I am thinking of you.”

  We kiss one last time. It is soft and slow and sad. I am the one to break it off. If I keep going, I’ll never be able to stop.

  “You go,” I beg him. “I can’t bear to walk away from you.”

  Luc releases my hands and pulls his jacket tighter around his body, even though it’s not particularly cold out. With a final nod, he turns and walks away down the block. As his shadowy form disappears around the corner, a fresh wave of tears cascades down my cheeks. Why did it take us so long to admit that we had feelings for each other? We could have done this a year ago. We would have had so much more time.

  I allow myself another minute or so, and then I dry my eyes with my scarf. Enough. Nobody can know that I’ve been crying, or else they might ask questions that I can’t answer. I straighten my clothes, fix my hair, and walk the rest of the way home on my own.

  Chapter 13

  Alice

  I meet Paul on a busy street corner, the kind of place where stopping means getting jostled by passersby from all directions. I triple-check Google Maps to make sure we get on the right train, while simultaneously trying to shield my screen from Paul’s prying eyes.

  “Alice, do you need me to help you?”

  “No! I want it to be a surprise.” I stare at my phone for another minute. This Paris transit map really is confusing.

  “What if you just tell me the general area?” Paul offers.

  “Champigny-sur-Marne.”

  I see it dawn on his face. His jaw drops, and his eyes light up behind his glasses. “We’re going to the French resistance museum!”

  “Oh no, I knew that would give it away!”

  “I don’t care! I’m so excited,” he says. “How did you know I’ve always wanted to go?”

  “You told me when I took you to see the apartment! It was after we found the letter from Ulrich.”

  Paul takes me by the hand and leads me down the steps to the station. “I cannot believe you remembered that.”

  “Speaking of Ulrich . . . I got a response from his son this morning.”

  Paul stops walking so abruptly, a businessman bumps into him and nearly drops his cup of coffee. After apologizing profusely to the man, Paul asks, “What did he say?”

  “Let’s get on the train first, and then I’ll show you.”

  He leads me to get our tickets and board the correct line, which turns out to be on the RER A. It’s probably a good thing I ended up letting him help me—I would have had us taking a route that was twice as long. As soon as we sit down, I take out my phone and show him the Facebook message I got from Ulrich Becker IV at 9:42 a.m. The English is choppy, but the takeaway is clear.

  Alice—I bring your message to my father. First, he must say he is ashamed of the events of the war. As a young man, my father fights for love of his country, not for Hitler, and he does not ever support the Nazi party.

  My father recalls Adalyn. He sees her many nights in Paris in 1942 and beginning of 1943, but not again after he has transfer to Belgium in the summer 1943. They did talk together, but no romance. She is just a friend to my father at that time, as he misses home. Thank you for your message. I hope I am helpful.

  Paul pushes his glasses back up his nose; they slid down while he was reading. “They never ended up together,” he says.

  “They were never together at all—not in a romantic way, at least.”

  “This is good news.”

  “I know. Well, except that we aren’t any closer to figuring out what happened to her.”

  Paul furrows his brow. “Who do you think she was actually writing about in the diary?” he asks.

  “I have no idea,” I say. “But . . . it definitely makes me wonder about Adalyn again. Like, think about those very first diary entries I showed you. And now this. Half of the evidence says she wasn’t a Nazi sympathizer. But then there’s the photo—and the Hotel Belmont. I just keep asking myself, like, who was she?”

  “Hmmm,” says Paul, leaning back in his seat.

  We lapse into contemplative silence. It feels different riding next to Paul than it did on our way out to Versailles—good different. I keep looking over at him and thinking, We kissed. Sitting next to him, with his hand casually resting on my knee, I can’t help but feel like we’re a couple—like I’m actually in a real relationship for the first time in my life. Like Camila and Peter. Of course, I have to keep reminding myself I’m only here for a little while longer; then it’s back to Jersey to get ready for another school year. I guess I should just enjoy this while I can.

  The train pulls into the station, and we gather up our things. We exit onto a suburban street lined with unremarkable stores and cafés, and we follow the sidewalk as it crosses over a slow-moving greenish river. It’s a bit of a walk from here to the museum, so we stop at a bakery for a quick coffee and a croissant along the way.

  “So what makes you like the French resistance?” I ask as I pop the to-go lids onto our cups.

  “Good question,” Paul mumbles through a mouthful of pastry. He takes a second to swallow. “I think I have always been fascinated by how young some of them were. We learned about the resistance in school when I was little, and I remember thinking, Oh my goodness, these people were only a few years older than me, and they were rescuing Allied pilots and blowing up buildings!”

  “They blew up buildings?”

  “I think so, yes. They did all sorts of things. There wasn’t really one official ‘resistance’ group, although Charles de Gaulle did send this one man, Jean Moulin, to try to bring together some of the networks. He was arrested by the Gestapo, and they tortured him to death. They tortured a lot of people to death.”

  I grimace.

  “Anyway,” Paul says, “the point is the ‘resistance’ was basically a bunch of people doing different things in different places. Some of them delivered messages, some of them spied on the Germans, some of them gave shelter to Allied pilots when their planes were shot down . . .”

  “I guess I always pictured a little group of guys in berets running around and sabotaging trains,” I confess.

  Paul laughs. “It makes sense. That’s the only stuff they put in the movies.”

  The Museum of National Resistance looks like an old manor house on a sparse residential street, with a wrought-iron gate at the entrance. We go inside and I pay for our tickets, then follow Paul to a wall of glass cases showing all sorts of documents from the early days of the Occupation.

  “They were so brave,” I murmur, peering at a newspaper called Résistance. It was published by a group of people connected to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, many of whom were later arrested by the Gestapo and either executed or deported.

  We stroll from exhibit to exhibit, past the rusty old roneo machine and the replica of the explosive strapped to the railway tracks. I try not to think about Adalyn, because it only makes me frustrated. Paul and I are conte
mplating the collection of scary-looking submachine guns, when suddenly I realize I really have to pee after that cup of coffee on the way here.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” I say, pointing to the bathroom sign up ahead. I leave Paul standing at the gun wall and hurry for the toilets.

  When I’m done, I go back the way I came, past exhibits we haven’t seen yet. As I skim the glass cases, something catches my eye—a series of black-and-white photographs. They all depict the same group of people in slightly different poses, and even though I’m sure I’ve never seen the pictures before, something about them seems familiar.

  I go closer to the glass to get a better look. It’s the girl—the girl sitting there in the grass. It’s—

  “PAUL!” I scream, startling a family nearby. “PAUL, COME HERE QUICK!”

  As Paul races over, I blink a few times to make sure I’m not seeing things, but apparently, I’m not. It’s definitely who I think it is.

  “Alice,” he says, breathing heavily. “What is it?”

  My whole arm shakes as I point at the photos. I can’t even remember how to speak. Paul looks into the glass case. Then he takes off his glasses, wipes them on his shirt, and puts them back on again. He looks into the glass case again.

  “Oh my god,” he says.

  I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Truly, it doesn’t make sense. She can’t be here, in a French resistance museum . . . but somehow, she is. It’s the same group of teenagers in each of the photographs—three boys, and one girl.

  The girl is Adalyn.

  Her piercing stare drew me in from across the room. It couldn’t possibly be anyone else. That’s her in each of the photos, sitting in the grass with the same three boys. The camera captured them midconversation, and someone must have been telling a funny story, because everybody’s smiling and laughing. One of the boys is staring in awe at a butterfly perched on his finger, and I notice with a sickening jolt that he also has a Star of David pinned to his breast pocket. Could this be the friend Adalyn wrote about in her diary—the one who was rounded up? And who are the others?

  “Look, there’s a description,” Paul says, pointing.

  The paragraph is typed in English and French, so Paul and I read it simultaneously:

  THESE PHOTOS WERE TAKEN IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS BY PIERRE-HENRI BOUCHARD, A YOUNG PHOTOGRAPHY STUDENT AND RESISTANCE FIGHTER. IN 1944, BOUCHARD WAS ARRESTED AND SENT TO THE BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, WHERE HE WAS MURDERED. HIS YOUNGER SISTER DISCOVERED THESE PHOTOGRAPHS AFTER HIS DEATH. THE SUBJECTS REMAIN UNIDENTIFIED, BUT THEY ARE BELIEVED TO HAVE WORKED WITH BOUCHARD ON RESISTANCE EFFORTS PRIOR TO HIS CAPTURE.

  The part about the concentration camp is too horrible to read more than once, but I stare at that last sentence for a good long time with my mouth hanging open.

  Paul seems equally dumbfounded. “So . . . after all this . . . she was doing resistance work?”

  I dig my fingertips into my temples. “I mean . . . maybe? But it still doesn’t explain the Nazi photo . . . and the Hotel Belmont . . . and also, if Adalyn was this great resistance fighter, then why would my Gram never mention her? That’s the kind of thing Gram would have been proud of!” I sweep my hair into a bun as I search the photos for answers that I know aren’t there. Why is it that the more I learn about Gram’s past, the further I get from any concrete explanations? Now I’m starting to panic. I’m only in Paris for another week and a half, and I owe Dad an answer on whether I’m okay with selling the apartment. What if I need more time?

  “Paul, what should we do?”

  “I think we should tell the museum we know this person in the photo,” he says. I can barely think straight, and it sounds like a smart thing to do, so I let him lead me back to the desk where we bought our tickets. Without a moment’s hesitation, he goes to the woman and speaks to her in French, pointing first to me, and then in the direction of the photos. The woman listens patiently and nods her head. Then she picks up the phone and speaks to someone in a hushed voice.

  “She’s calling the museum curator,” Paul tells me.

  It only takes a few minutes for a woman with a shiny silver bob to come meet us in the lobby.

  “Antoinette Richard,” she says with a warm smile, shaking both of our hands. After Paul and I introduce ourselves—and we learn that Antoinette Richard speaks very good English—the curator leads us back to her office, a small room with bookshelves covering every wall.

  “I hear that you have possibly identified a person in one of our photographs,” she says when we’re all seated.

  “Yes,” I reply. “It’s my great-aunt Adalyn. It looks exactly like her.”

  “Do you have a photograph?”

  “No—not on me, at least. They’re all in her old apartment, which hasn’t been touched since the war.”

  Ms. Richard’s eyebrows shoot up so high, they disappear under her bangs. “Pardon me?”

  I glance over at Paul, and he gives me a little nod of encouragement. With a deep breath, I launch into the story of Gram’s apartment and everything I know about Adalyn, the good and the bad and the question marks in between. Ms. Richard is riveted, especially when I show her the photos I have of the apartment on my phone. This must be like Christmas for a museum curator.

  By the time I’m finished explaining things, I feel like I’ve run a marathon. “What do you think?” I ask helplessly. “Could she have been in the resistance, or was she definitely a Nazi sympathizer?”

  Ms. Richard, who was leaning in to listen to my story, sits back and crosses her arms. “As a historian, I don’t like to draw conclusions before doing the proper research,” she says flatly. “Without seeing any of the documents myself, I’m afraid it is impossible for me to make a determination one way or the other.”

  “If we bring in more photos, would you take a look at them?” Paul asks.

  “Most certainly,” she replies.

  “We’ll bring you everything,” I promise. But there’s something I still want to ask her. “Ms. Richard, do you have any idea how I could go about tracking down my great-aunt? We don’t even know if she’s still alive, but if she is, I’d like to find her.”

  To my surprise, Ms. Richard says, “I have an idea.” She pulls open the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet and riffles through it until she finds a red-white-and-blue flyer, which she slides across the desk. I read the title at the top.

  “Project Geronte?”

  “It was started by an acquaintance of mine, Corinne, whose grandfather ran an intelligence network based in Paris. Because of the secrecy it required, it can be hard to know who exactly was involved. I mean, look at the situation you’re dealing with here. The purpose of Project Geronte is to bring all these people together, with their families, in a sort of community. They get to meet each other and share their stories after all these years, and we as historians get to write it all down.”

  “You think someone there would know Adalyn?”

  “I don’t know. But I bring it up because they meet on the third Wednesday of every month, so the next one is a week from now. I’m not able to attend—tomorrow I leave for Canada to give a series of lectures, and I’ll be gone for a week and a half—but I would be happy to put you in touch with Corinne. I think she’s almost eighty, but she’ll get back to you on email no problem. And I’ll give you copies of the photos to take with you.”

  Paul and I look at each other, then back at Ms. Richard.

  “That would be awesome,” I tell her. “Thank you so much.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” she says, picking up the phone. “If your great-aunt is still alive, and she was in the resistance, then we must learn her story before it’s too late.”

  Chapter 14

  Adalyn

  I keep fumbling with the bottom button on my jacket. I just can’t get it to go through the hole. Every time I think I have it, the damned thing slides out again. It must be due to the fact that my hands are shaking.

  Finally, I get it done. I step in
front of the hall mirror and study my reflection—my hair gathered on top and curling softly around my face, my lips painted bright red, a matching red ruby glittering at the base of my neck. I ask myself, If I were one of the most evil men in the world, would I want to buy me a drink?

  I don’t know. I haven’t any idea how his mind works. But I hope so.

  The wooden floor creaks. I hear footsteps coming from down the hall. Chloe. I would say goodbye to her, but I know she wouldn’t answer. Instead, I watch in the mirror as she passes right behind me on her way to the drawing room, so close than I can feel the air move. This is the way we are now: two ships passing in the night. That’s it. I’d better go.

  The restaurant von Groth and his men frequent is called Au Coq Blanc—or it used to be, before it was changed to German. It’s situated on the corner of rue des Saussaies and rue Montalivet in the Eighth Arrondissement . . . not far from Madame LaRoche’s apartment, and opposite Gestapo headquarters. Normally, I wouldn’t dare walk down this street. I must try to stay focused on the task at hand, and not on the French prisoners who are currently trapped behind the doors of 11, rue des Saussaies, suffering from god knows what evil things von Groth has subjected them to. What if I become the next to join them? What if I, too, end up wishing I would die quickly rather than endure more of his torture?

  My hands are shaking again. I need them to stop. Von Groth is smart. If he sees that I am nervous, he will know right away.

  With a deep breath, I step into the restaurant. It’s a splendid place, with dizzyingly high ceilings, mirrors as tall as three grown men standing on top of one another, and a massive chandelier. When my eyes travel down to the area beneath it, my breath catches in my throat—even after three years of Occupation, it still disturbs me—a half dozen Germans reclining with their polished black boots on the tablecloth.