And now, here she was. More striking than even his dreams had allowed for. Jacob breathed deeply, as if the air had grown thick. He could smell her, smell that sweet musky scent which lingered around her when she was performing. He tore himself away from it. He must leave before her. At the Alger, they would be safe. He knew the patron, knew the night attendant.
Sylvie, gazing in Jacob’s direction in the midst of a number, saw an empty chair. Longing swept through her. She had been singing for him and now he was gone. She curtailed the encores she was usually pleased to give and left the hotel just after midnight had chimed. She felt the gaze of Nadine of the hundred eyes, as she had begun to call her, trailing her.
Jacob was waiting for her in the small untidy bar of the Alger. Wiser, now, she did not even attempt to greet him. She simply met his eyes, held them. They were so dark. Sylvie shivered. There was something new in them, something intransigent. She took the hand he held out, felt its strength, unfamiliar now. She walked with him past the hotel attendant, who nodded without looking up.
Two endless flights of stairs. An unfamiliar corridor, dimly-lit, in which his shadow seemed huge. Who was this man she was following? A whiff of danger, of the illicit, filled her nostrils. It excited and frightened her at once.
Jacob opened a door into a darkened room, lit two candles. They gazed at each other in the flickering light for a long moment.
‘Sylvie,’ It was the only word which passed between them and it was less word than sob. He traced the line of her face, her long graceful neck and then with an abandon she didn’t associate with her husband, found her lips. The hunger in him woke her to his passion, centred her own. It was a hunger she didn’t recognize in him, a deep ache which she didn’t know if she could fill. Yet it reminded her of something, of that unquenchable thirst she had felt in the first days of their affair when she came, a slip of a girl with an inexhaustible excitement, to his flat on the Ile St Louis. Past memory flamed present desire. When he pulled her down on top of him in the middle of the soft sloping bed, her mind receded. All she could feel was the unutterable pleasure of this thrusting object which yoked them.
That pleasure for Jacob was haunted by images which pursued him, though awake he was able to keep them at bay. Bodies staring into dusty space on desolate fields; bodies like his now, on their backs, limbs askew; faces distorted by the surprise of sudden death. He turned Sylvie over, buried his face in her breast, thrust, thrust at the pain, urging it to life, purging it in her pleasure. When his cries came, he muffled them in her skin, letting the tears flow instead.
‘I’ve missed you, Sylvie,’ he said, when breath would allow him. ‘Missed you too much. I would have come to you sooner, had it been possible.’
His eyes when she looked into them were haunted. ‘Talk to me,’ she said. ‘Tell me about you.’
He told her what he could, hid more, turned the questions back at her, listened intently, stroked her, her hair, her glistening skin, until she wanted him again and again. In her, he nonetheless evaded her. Jacob has become elusive, she thought, said it to him. He smiled, but his eyes were still. He held her tightly, so tightly. They slept.
When she awoke to the bright Mediterranean light, he was already gone. Only the bed bore the traces of his presence. Sylvie fingered the sheets.
On the single chest lay an envelope. She opened it. A thick roll of money tumbled out and a hasty note. ‘I will come back as soon as I can. Be well. Be safe. My love.’
She still didn’t know the name the man she had slept with bore.
I am a whore, Sylvie thought. She smiled.
Chapter
Ten
__________
∞
On a grimly cold morning, late in the harsh winter of 1941, Dr. Marcel Derain reported to the prison camp of Chambarran outside Grenoble.
The guards were expecting him. ‘Ah oui, Docteur Derain. You’re replacing Docteur Bertrand this week.’
‘Yes, poor old Bertrand is suffering from influenza,’ Derain wiped the mist off his spectacles with a large handkerchief. ‘But he’ll mend. Another week or so.’
The guard glanced at Derain’s identification. The man didn’t look too well himself. His coat seemed too heavy for his sloping shoulders and he had a vague, preoccupied air, as if the last thing he wanted to do was take over Bertrand’s duties. He dragged his feet as they marched towards the camp infirmary.
Derain made his rounds slowly, talking desultorily to the patients, dragging his stethoscope or thermometer from his black bag with a bumbling ineptness, bumping mistakenly into a German guard. So it was with some surprise that the Canadian officer in the corner bed found, once his abdomen had been examined, that his blanket was neatly folded over what his fingers quickly ascertained was a sharp edged file, a set of papers, a length of rope. He listened more carefully to the doctor’s rambling words, his tone of innocuous comfort. He was being given sleeping powders, which would also kill the pain, and if he and his fellows wanted to send a word of thanks to the good, but ailing, Dr. Bertrand who had tended to them so well thus far, he could be reached at 17 rue Sebastopol.
The Canadian understood instantly. These were his escape orders. He had a week to make use of the tools. Help would be waiting at the given address. He wondered if Bridges in the next bed, his companion in self-inflicted illness, had received the same instructions. He would find out later. For the moment, he watched the Doctor continue his slow, lumbering rounds. Clever, this Frenchman. No one would suspect anything of that clumsy, ineffectual man, whose eyes seemed almost blind behind the thick spectacles.
From the camp, Dr Derain made his way to the University of Grenoble. In its environs, he began to move more quickly. He had a lecture to give, a standin lecture for Dr. Bertrand’s anatomy class and he was already late. With a steady thoroughness, he took the assembled students through the rudiments of the nervous system. When the hour drew to its end, he asked in a mumbling voice that three of the students stay behind. Dr. Bertrand had left some notes for them.
One by one, he addressed the students. The nature of his communication, however, was hardly medical. It contained precise details of time, place, and date for the pick-up and delivery of a child. As well as a warning. The previous week, the line had been betrayed. Caution was necessary. The passwords must be carefully adhered to. To each student, he clearly enunciated the new sets of questions and replies. To each, he also gave an envelope containing the large sums necessary for the guides.
Then with his slow, awkward tread, Dr. Derain walked the short distance to the Hotel des Montagnes. It was only as he neared room 418 that his pace changed and he took the thick spectacles from his eyes. He knocked on the door, three quick taps, followed by a pause, then four louder ones.
Princesse Mathilde opened the door and gazed at her visitor with a momentary consternation.
‘Jacob!’ She closed the door quickly behind him. ‘Jacob, I wasn’t expecting you. What’s happened?’
‘A little problem on the line.’ He shrugged. ‘An informer. I should have suspected. They rounded up one of the guides and two Canadian officers we were moving as a favour to Jean Beaulieu.’ He anticipated Mathilde’s question. ‘The children are safe.’
‘And you’re here as Derain?’
Jacob nodded. ‘Old Bertrand has been as compliant as ever. More so. I have his prison round this week.’ He grinned.
Worry creased Mathilde’s features, ‘You shouldn’t, Jacob.’ She frowned, ‘It’s too risky.’
He put his arm round her and smiled his old teasing smile, ‘While as you, Madame la Princesse, do nothing which involves any risk at all.’ They gazed into each other’s eyes and for a brief moment enjoyed the sense of shared action and shared secrets.
For over a year now the clandestine escape route Jacob and the Princesse had established had functioned with only a minimum of hitches. The line moved Jewish children from Paris or one of the notorious internment camps to Switzerland, often passing thro
ugh Grenoble, a centre of Gaullist sentiment and resistance activity, which thus offered a variety of ‘safe’ houses. In Grenoble and its vicinity Jacob worked in the persona of Dr. Marcel Derain. What brought him here officially were the occasional series of guest lectures on neurology he gave at the university at the behest of his old colleague Dr. Bertrand. In Montpelier and the South West, Jacob went under the identity of Jules Lemaître. Jacob Jardine had now formally been ascertained to have died in action.
The line which ended with the Princesse in Switzerland had thus far transported over one hundred children. Occasionally Mathilde would cross the frontier with her false bottomed suitcase which contained the large sums necessary for financing the operation and bring one or two children back with her on the train, herself. She felt little fear when doing this. Her imposing stature, her title, her unblinkling gaze quelled even the most officious guard’s queries. And her alibis were always impeccable. There were old sick relatives with grand names to visit in France and the children she sometimes personally brought back with her were pupils for the school she had opened in the Chateau Valois. She was, after all, not unknown as an educator if anyone cared to check. Nonetheless, she didn’t make the journey to France too often. It was safer not to arouse suspicion unnecessarily and jeopardize the entire operation.
Jacob and she had last met outside Grenoble some four months ago. It had not begun as an auspicious occasion. Jacob had just made his way back from Paris across the demarcation line and his distress, however veiled, was evident to her in his every gesture. It took her several hours to extract the full painful story from him.
In Paris he had been to see one of their contacts, Sophie Stein. It was a household which sported the yellow star the Nazis had imposed on the Jews. Like so many others, Sophie had begun by wearing the star because she was a law-abiding citizen and she couldn’t believe that the French, her friends, her compatriots, would allow anything terrible to happen to the Jews. When her husband, a foreign Jew, was taken away in October of 1940, she started to realise their mistake. But she didn’t want to leave her home. She had two small children and she still hoped her husband would return. Nonetheless, contacted by the underground, she began to work with them, occasionally feeding children into Jacob’s network.
Jacob had come to see her while in Paris, because he wanted to convince her it was time to flee South. He had heard rumours which made it clear to him that her time was running out. He arrived too late. When he rang the bell of her flat in the Marais, the Gestapo opened the door. He took in the situation at a glance. Sophie was pressed against the wall, her small daughter in her arms, her son whimpering by her skirts. Blood was running down her face. In front of her, there stood a second officer, thin-faced, his eyes a cool, callous grey.
‘I’m a doctor,’ Jacob said evenly. ‘I had a message that a child was sick here.’
While he was pulled into the room and then shoved unceremoniously into a corner, he heard the second Gestapo officer mutter, ‘There will be more than one sick child here unless Mrs. Stein names some names.’
‘I don’t know what you want from me,’ Sophie mumbled.
With a savage gesture, the German ripped the little girl from her arms and threw her forcibly against the floor. The child howled, struck her head against a table leg, was silent. Jacob lunged forward, ‘We don’t treat people like this in this country,’ he shouted, landing a punch on the man’s chest with all his strength. He felt him fold and then from behind, something struck him at the base of his neck. The last thing he remembered seeing were the small boy’s dark eyes weeping silent tears.
He woke in a prison cell. No sooner awake than the interrogation began. Yes, he was Dr. Jules Lemaître. No, he had never before visited the house in question. No, he had no more than the usual animosity towards the Germans, but the Gestapo’s behaviour towards that woman and her children had been inexcusable. They locked him into a cell again, took away his clothes, his black bag. In the distance, he heard screams, unceasing, intolerable.
Some time later his interrogation was renewed. No, he wasn’t Jewish. The officer must know that only 2% of Jewish doctors were now allowed to practice. So how could he be? A French officer had walked into the room at that point, but his interrogator pressed on. But Dr. Lemaître was circumcised, wasn’t he? The men who had stripped him down had noted that.
Yes, but the circumcision was hardly religious. Jacob had his story ready. It had had to be performed when he was eighteen, due to an infection. They could check the hospital records. They were on file. He named place and date and then, staring at the French officer, demanded to see a lawyer, demanded to be allowed to ring his colleagues to alert them to his whereabouts. He had done nothing wrong except lose his temper. After his continued insistence, they finally allowed him to phone. He rang Jacques. Within two hours, his release had been arranged. Two hours after that, he ascertained that Sophie Stein and both her children had disappeared.
He left Paris the next day. He knew he had been lucky. The same strings could not be pulled a second time. He chastised himself mercilessly. If only he had come to Sophie’s house sooner. If only he hadn’t over-reacted and punched the officer, then Sophie and her children might still be safe. But in himself he knew that his action had probably only hastened things a little. What he had witnessed was a daily occurrence, an instance of wide spread suffering and pitiless atrocity. The only hope for change was to loosen the Nazis’ stranglehold on Europe.
By the time he reached the Princesse’s address outside Grenoble, he was consumed by a cold, implacable rage. Even after she had extricated the story from him, it maintained its icy grip. ‘Eh oui, mon ami,’ she had said to him. ‘That’s what all our efforts are about now. We shall overthrow that barbaric regime. Somehow. Meanwhile you and I play mother and father to an endless stream of frightened children. Hitler’s orphans. We do what we can,’ she shook her head sadly and took his hand, trying to stroke some warmth into him.
He had fallen into her arms as if life lay there. A life which had nothing to do with heinous and random suffering and plots and schemes and the vertigo of changing identities; a life always and ever constrained by the sense that whatever one did wasn’t enough; a life lived with death as a familiar. They had spent the night together, made love slowly like old friends who had time on their side. And they had slept, a deep untroubled sleep, a parenthesis in that straining sentence which was war.
As they surveyed each other in the Grenoble hotel room now, they both remembered that last meeting. A stolen moment which could not be replicated on this occasion. Jacob’s time was pressing. He had two more meetings in the hills outside the city that evening. They exchanged the necessary information. Money for the increasingly expensive guides who led the refugees over the precarious mountain passes was unearthed from Mathilde’s case. They embraced mutely. And then Jacob walked out into the frosty night.
Two days later, he returned to the camp at Chambarran for the second of the week’s routine visits. But something had happened to disturb the routine. Guards at the gate were numerous. He was instantly marched into the Commandant’s office, his bag, his coat, his clothes, ruthlessly searched. Jacob knew how to read the signs. Beneath the placid, bumbling exterior of Dr. Derain, a little thrill went through him. There must have been an escape. Successful, he hoped. Security had been trebled.
The Commandant looked at him with increasing displeasure as his bag revealed nothing more surprising than the usual doctor’s implements. The man scowled. ‘Dr. Derain, two prisoners have escaped from the infirmary since your last visit. What do you know about it?’ The voice which came from the plump face was threatening. He plied at the bottom and sides of Jacob’s bag with stubby fingers and then threw it impatiently across the room.
Jacob allowed the surprise to settle slowly on his face and then looked with a fearful man’s caution at the Commandant.
‘I? I know nothing. How dreadful for you. I am sorry, Monsieur le Commandant,’ he sto
oped a little more into his capacious suit. And then he looked directly into the man’s eyes, his own sheltered behind the thick spectacles. ‘Monsieur le Commandant, would a man like me dare to come back into your camp if I had helped an escapee?’ A tiny self-derisory smiled tugged at his mouth.
The Commandant looked at him closely and then blurted out, ‘Let him do his rounds.’
The officers tailed him. Jacob walked with Derain’s blundering countryman’s gait towards the infirmary and slowly carried out his duties under watchful eyes. The Canadians were gone. His part of the return favour to Beaulieu was accomplished.
When he left the prison, he made his way by a circuitous route back to the University. From the locker-room, he picked up a case and went to the train station. The train to Toulouse was on time. Jacob found a seat in the third carriage. As they neared the first stop, he walked slowly to the lavatory. There, he changed quickly into a well-fitting suit; ruffled the pomade out of his hair, so that it’s tousled curl returned; exchanged thick spectacles for a pair of heavy hornrimmed glasses; put Derain’s papers into a compartment in his case and took out Lemaître’s; and donned a soft grey hat. When the train started to move again, he joined the line of newcomers and with a busy, efficient man’s brisk pace strode into a different compartment.
As he sat down and pulled out of his pocket an old medical journal, he wondered wryly to himself at the skills war had taught him. Not only him, but countless others. A welter of resources untapped in peacetime. He was continually amazed at people’s endurance, their fierce loyalties, the instant, unspoken camaraderie which grew up between strangers engaged in common tasks. He marvelled at the ability the war had spawned in all of them for living in the present, from moment to discrete moment, as if the future, a time after the war, was akin to a heavenly afterlife and not part of the continuum of existence.
Memory and Desire Page 25