Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  “Building a bomb is easy. Getting it to where it can do the most good—the most destruction,” she said, “that’s the trick.”

  “What’s this a picture of?”

  “Anton said he’d devised a foolproof scheme for bringing down SS headquarters at the Jeu de Paume. It’s a schematic diagram of the basement, pointing out critical places where we could collapse the entire structure.”

  “It’s no good?”

  “With Janssen, Guy, and two or three of the others to help, and Anton to oversee things, there’s an excellent chance we would succeed. After he was killed, we tried on our own, but the bomb went off before we could get close to the musee. I was convinced that when I had this drawing and Anton’s notes, we—I’m the fool. They’ve doubled the guard. I can’t approach within a hundred meters.”

  She inspected the envelope again. Perhaps the error wasn’t in the plan, but was hers, a misunderstood word, or else a line interrupted where coffee or wine had seeped through the paper, mistakes which could be overcome. Soon she shut off the light, and the curses began again. Eddie said, “They can hear you through the walls,” and she pressed her face into the pillow.

  “There aren’t easier targets, not as well-protected, where you can slip in with a smaller bomb?” he said.

  “I didn’t come to Paris to make a small explosion.”

  He tried to look like he shared her disappointment. It was easy, talking to her back. “You believed you could defeat Germany? A handful of saboteurs?”

  “If we could hurt the SS in their stronghold, the symbol of the occupation, it might inspire resistance.”

  “The Germans would send in more men,” Eddie said, “and billet them behind thicker walls. Institute harsher laws against the people.”

  “It might wake them up. The French are complacent, content to go on as close to normal as they can. They don’t really mind the Germans. Do I have to remind you that many support them?”

  “You’re not French yourself?”

  “You’re still determined to have my biography? Chew on this: I used to think I was.”

  “How can someone not know what she is?”

  “I came by it honestly,” she said. “An honest mistake.”

  “You know better now.”

  “I suspect I always did—that I’m Palestinian.”

  “From which land?”

  “You’ve never heard of it?”

  He shook his head.

  “It doesn’t exist yet as a country.” She flopped onto her back and bent the pillow behind her. “Had I realized you wouldn’t know what to make of my story, I’d have confessed everything.”

  “If it’s not a country—”

  “I don’t live there only in my mind, believe me. It’s a British colony in the holy land.”

  “Then you’re British.”

  “As much as living under the Nazis has made you German, that’s how British I am.”

  “No, not German. Not American either.”

  “The renowned jazz trumpeter from New Orleans isn’t American? Oh, I see, a Frenchman. I hadn’t heard that America sold Louisiana back to France.”

  “I took it for granted that I was what they said I was where I was born,” Eddie said. “Another honest mistake.”

  “But you’re going back,” she said. “Back home.”

  “If that’s what you want to call it. How did you come from Palestine to France?”

  “It’s a military secret. Part of this.” She sat up, fingering the diagram. Then she tore it lengthwise, and again from side to side, shredded the scraps till they were too small to make smaller, got off the bed, and went quickly to the bathroom. Eddie heard the toilet flush, and she came back whisking her hands one against the other.

  “You’ve declared a truce in your war on the SS?”

  “Not for a minute,” she said. “But as a civilian again, I can answer your question. I was flown here from England.”

  “You’re poking fun at me,” Eddie said. “English planes don’t fly into occupied France.”

  “They fly over it. What they don’t do is land. I jumped out.”

  “You?”

  “Not many proper English gentlemen volunteer to do it.”

  “Why did you?”

  “At my school in Palestine, the Girls’ Agricultural School at Nahalal, where I was a teacher, I was noticed by the British SOE—the Special Operations Executive—as a fluent French speaker who might blend in here, who knows France and the people, and like all Palestinians is especially motivated to do something to help in the fight against Germany. With a few others, I was taken to England for training.”

  “In building bombs?”

  “In writing letters in invisible ink. In sending and receiving wireless messages in Morse code, in hand-to-hand combat, in all manner of useless things. The British are enamored of having operatives in Paris, but they haven’t figured out what to do with us. The operation was a balagan—a mess—from the start. We were dropped over Brittany. German spotters had picked up our plane over the Channel and were shooting at us before we reached the ground. I was the only one of my group to reach Paris. That’s where I found Goudsmit, who had put together his own cell of anti-Germans. The rest you know enough of.”

  “You’ll go home now to Palestine?”

  “Back to England would be a good first step.”

  “I’m trying for Switzerland myself,” Eddie said. “You’re welcome to come along. It’s easier to reach.”

  “But not to get into. The Swiss have become particular about who they allow in their country. And my passport isn’t the best. Anyway, Switzerland is like a rat trap. After you’ve tasted the cheese, there’s no way out.”

  “Where else in Europe don’t you find the Germans in control?”

  “Spain.”

  “You expect Franco to welcome you with open arms?”

  “He’s not the humanitarian of the year, but he’s no lackey of Hitler’s. They say he’s of Jewish descent. Unlike the Swiss, he doesn’t turn away refugees or send them back across the border. You’re welcome to accompany me.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. “Will you consider Switzerland?”

  “No. But I will let you buy me a ticket for Vitoria-Gasteiz, in Spain.”

  They agreed that he would take her to Gare Austerlitz, the hub of the Paris-Bordeaux line, where she could catch a train for the unoccupied zone. He’d never experienced such loneliness in the company of a beautiful girl as he did on the long taxi ride across the city. He didn’t fault himself for doing nothing to oppose the Nazis. Anne was a romantic, possessed of the freakish courage to drop from a plane onto a continent under the boot heel of invaders who showed no mercy to their enemies. As a realist he knew better. Tossing a wrench into the most powerful military machine in the world wouldn’t slow it. Only because he lacked a home to return to had he overstayed his welcome.

  For no reason a record began playing in his head, an Al Jolson side from twenty years before with primitive blowing from a cornetist he was unable to identify to this day. It wasn’t the melody haunting him but the lyrics, and he conjured a duet in which he made painful harmony with the exuberant Jolson.

  “Swanee, how I love you, how I love you,

  My dear old Swanee,

  I’d give the world to be

  Among the folks back home in D-I-X-I

  Even know my mammy’s waiting for me, praying for me

  Down by the Swanee.”

  Swanee. Being stuck in the Alps for the duration of the war, or even for eternity, wasn’t cruel punishment. In the Swiss rat trap the cheese was fondue, and the chocolate was the best.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The high-ceilinged waiting room at the Austerlitz station made for excellent acoustics for German snores. Soldiers in gray sprawled shoulder to shoulder on every bench, heads thrown back. Eddie’s trumpet provoked derision as a symbol of impotence second only to a baguette tucked under the arm. Every glance at Anne was a
leer. On the ticket line she turned to him and asked, “Have you thought about what I said? You’re making a mistake, you understand.”

  “Is there an address where I can write to you,” he asked, “so I know you made it out of Europe in one piece?”

  “In one piece? Really, you expect too much.” Then her mood turned glum again. “You won’t hear from me.”

  He paid for a second-class carriage to Pau, the last stop before the Spanish frontier. There she would determine whether it was safe to go farther by train or to try the mountains on foot. Suddenly she embraced him, and when he touched his lips to hers she allowed them to linger. The German corporal watching them from the information kiosk lost interest around the time Eddie did. It was a dry kiss, delivered with wide-open eyes. Anne wasn’t a natural actress, beyond her range in the role of a tragic Frenchwoman wrenched apart from her lover. When she pushed away, Eddie took his money from his pocket and forced most of it on her. It didn’t buy a better kiss. A quick squeeze of his hand transmitted warmth absent from her embrace.

  A train rolled into the shed, a fleet of freight cars shunted to a side track as though it had wandered lost from the countryside, and stopped at the passenger terminal seeking directions. Eight minutes later, a German locomotive glided up to the opposite platform hauling panzers and field pieces on flatcars stretching from the vanishing point on the horizon. Anne looked at her watch as Eddie told her, “With all that’s going on in this war, you can throw your timetable out the window.”

  A blur of red, black, and silver defined as boxcars, coal hoppers, and chemical tanks pulled in to the station for a few minutes, then resumed motion in the direction from which they had come. A whistle sounded three short blasts, and Eddie looked up the track. “Only half an hour late,” he said.

  Air brakes shrieked. Wheels ground against the tracks where the military train had stopped. As Anne started to the platform, a German soldier got in her way.

  “Nein, Mademoiselle, this train is not for you.”

  A dozen third-class carriages lagged behind a steam engine emblazoned SNCF, Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer, the French national carrier. Two conductors hopped down from the car behind the coal tender. Eddie saw them slip inside the dispatcher’s shed at the end of the platform while a convoy of green and white municipal buses drew up behind the station. Gendarmes sealed the area. After ten minutes the doors opened and passengers swarmed out, not so much a cross-section of society, but a mishmash that had entered the buses as families, and been sloshed around inside, women with men who appeared to be strangers, youngsters in the care of adults looking nothing like them, and everyone with the same dazed expression, blinking and confused, as if they’d emerged from a pit. Mothers screamed louder than the babies they were unable to hush. The gendarmes prodded them with batons as they sorted themselves out in the street. Eddie heard “Vite, vite, vite,” along with “Mach schnell,” and the crowd was rearranged into lines and marched through the great hall of the station to the waiting train.

  He took Anne aside to avoid being swept up in the mob. Luggage consisted of a single bag, or a parcel wrapped in brown paper tied with twine. Conspicuous were a handful of women in high fashion and men in tailored suits, who looked to be embarking on short notice on a vacation with the poorest of the poor. The children wailed at the gendarmes patrolling the ragged lines. An aged man with the lapels of his Norfolk jacket festooned with military decorations propped up an elderly woman who had fainted in his arms. He asked something of the closest gendarme and received the answer from his baton.

  “Another roundup of foreigners,” Eddie said to Anne.

  “Foreign Jews, I should say.”

  “They don’t all look like Jews.”

  “How should Jews look?”

  “Some of these people are quite dark. Not Jews, but Gypsies, am I right?”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “I’ve never seen dark Jews before.”

  “I bet you have, but didn’t know what they are. They’re North Africans.”

  “African Jews?”

  “From Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia. Since Vichy took over administration of French possessions, the Arabs have been subjected to Nazi propaganda, who have made their lives miserable. It used to be that no one ever noticed them in France. Now everyone does. Soon you won’t see any.”

  “How do you know so much about them?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Yes, of course, but—”

  “They’ve begun to make their way to Palestine with terrible stories.”

  “Where are they being taken now?”

  “A concentration camp has been established at Pithiviers, near Orléans. They’ll be held there for a time.”

  “And from Pithiviers?”

  “No one knows.”

  “How can that be?”

  “No one has ever come back to tell.”

  He reexamined the mass of people. The lightest weren’t lighter than he was. The darker he would take for Arabs, if not Gypsies. Probably he’d seen them on the avenues and assumed that was what they were. If he had thought about them at all. Django’s Gypsy girlfriend, Sophie Ziegler, was wrongly assumed to be a Jew. He searched the platform for a short, dark woman in the company of a darker man with a trim moustache, and a hand mangled and nearly lost in a fire when he was eighteen, which had forced him to relearn his instrument in his brilliant idiosyncratic manner, perhaps clutching a guitar case as Eddie Piron clung to his trumpet, impotent for all the world to see. He turned away from Anne, but tears in her eyes made it unnecessary.

  “I failed at everything I came to do,” she said. “All I managed to blow up was my house. I’m leaving without injuring a single German, let alone the SS. Without rallying the French. Nothing. I accomplished absolutely nothing. Assuming the road to hell is paved with good intentions, I’m well on the way to—Never mind. Plenty of dynamite is left. If I had a gram of courage I’d go back. Then at least I can say—”

  “That you got yourself killed for more of nothing.”

  “Not for nothing.”

  They were shoved back as the mob was stalled at the entrance to the train. Several of the Jews tripped over each other, bringing down more at Eddie’s feet. A gendarme knocked off-balance clubbed them again and again, screaming for them to get up. Eddie caught his wrist on the upswing and snatched the baton away, was whipping it at the gendarme’s head when he felt Anne’s hand on his shoulder, and let it fly.

  “Careful, monsieur.” Eddie pulled the gendarme upright. “You don’t want to fall and hurt yourself.”

  A German military policeman retrieved the club and stood shoulder to shoulder with the gendarme, his hand against the butt of his big service revolver. A feeling that a place was reserved for him on the train to the camp remained with Eddie until the soldier and then the gendarme walked away.

  “We should get out of here,” Anne said.

  “You’ll miss your train.”

  She looked toward the platform, at the gendarme with his back to the Jews pounding his stick against his palm. Then she took Eddie’s hand and pulled him to the street.

  “I must be crazy to have believed I could go on excursion out of occupied France,” she said. “And you, what were you thinking back there?”

  “Obviously I wasn’t.”

  “Obviously.”

  “No, that isn’t true. I was thinking about my brother.”

  “He’s in Paris?”

  “Just a thought I had.”

  They walked away from the station along the Quai d’Austerlitz. Anne freed her hand from his, struggled to keep up as Eddie picked up the pace. They went for blocks studying their shoes on the pavement, avoiding faces.

  “You’re too quiet,” Anne said. “Say something.”

  “What do you want to hear?”

  “That this damn war is over.”

  He turned his head toward her. “Look out,” she said, and he turned back as he was about to step off the curb i
n front of a truck. “You won’t tell me about your brother?”

  “Forget I mentioned him.”

  “I’m not a forgetter.”

  “Then don’t. Think I care?”

  “Why are you always so mysterious? Janssen said you gave away less about yourself in the bright lights than any of us in the underground.”

  “All there is is less,” Eddie said. “Less and less every day.”

  “Oh, that explains everything.”

  She stopped at a red light. Without breaking stride he caught her hand again and pulled her onto the Pont d’Austerlitz. A gang of laborers, paint-spattered, reeking of turpentine and a liquid lunch, came toward them on the walkway, giving Anne the eye complete with lewd remarks, until a flock of nuns walking arm in arm sent them away.

  “I was born in Picayune in the state of Mississippi,” Eddie said in English when they were alone again.

  “What? You’re muttering.”

  “That’s a few miles northeast of New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1908.” He stood at the railing and looked down into the river, at red and blue barges like flooded boxcars parked alongside the quai. “On my mother’s side I’m as French as anyone in Paris, but more so. We Pirons are laine pur, pure wool, who never trucked with foreign invaders as folks here seem to take to naturally. We left for the United States, which was French North America two hundred years ago, did all right for ourselves in sugar before backing the wrong cause in the American Civil War.”

  “Your father’s side? They were pure French also?”

  “Pure niggers. House slaves mostly, which made them a manner of aristocrats, the property of my mother’s people. They were the Pirons.”

  He looked hard at the girl to deter her from studying where the refined planter left off and the descendant of wild jungle tribesmen began. The hard look had no effect on hers.

  “It happened a lot in those times?” she said.

  “Ever get an eyeful of the Africans you have in Paris?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “There aren’t as many as there were. Run into some, you’d notice right off how black they are. There’s none like that back home. The boys in some of my old bands, Americans I played with here, for instance, you wouldn’t find a one of them close to that color. One hundred percent of American Negroes’ve got white granddaddies, or great-granddaddies, what have you, that owned grandma and had his way with her.”