Later that day, another older, stiffer German came in. ‘Is that your Wagen outside?’ He held the door open and pointed at the van.
‘Yes, my husband’s. But he is away —’
‘All transport is to be surrendered. Give me the keys, if you please.’
‘But Mrs Flanders needs the van to collect the milk, or I can’t bake. I can’t drive, you see. And we use it to collect flour from the mill, and to deliver bread to all the big hotels.’
He stared a moment. ‘Mrs Flanders, who is she?’
‘From the farm at the top of the hill. We help each other. I help with the milking, she drives the van.’
‘I will talk to the Feldkommandant. In the meantime, no driving.’
After he’d gone, I sighed. It was clear things were going to be different, and by the evening Mrs Flanders was on my doorstep again, out of breath from cycling, her glasses steamed up from her efforts.
‘It’s a good job my Walter’s dead and gone,’ she said, without preamble. ‘He’d turn in his grave. The farm’s to be completely taken over. We’re to grow wheat and barley and potatoes. And to make room for their crops, we’ve to abandon grazing and slaughter some of the cattle. It took years to build up that herd of Jerseys! The policeman who delivered the message was very apologetic, but he says they need to feed the German garrisons that’ll be stationed here.’
‘Oh Lord. What will you do? You’ve no men to help, have you?’
‘I don’t know. It seems an unholy muddle to me, and the harvest’s going to be a joke. But the policeman said no food will come from England, not now; so I suppose it’s do that or starve.’
‘They came this morning about the van and —’
‘That’s another thing. To keep the van, I’m to deliver all the bread to the officers stationed in the Grand Hotel in St Helier.’
‘Don’t I get a say in this?’
‘Seems not. We get to keep a tenth of it, they’re saying.’
CHAPTER 11
July 1940
Fred
Finding Pierre Severin, I decided, could take me a very long time. Was this treason to the Reich? Probably. I shut my mind to the thought. I decided not to go to the café that evening, but to have breakfast there instead and explore Paris a little more on foot. As I passed close to the Métro, I saw a German paper for sale. It was out of date, but I bought a copy anyway. ‘To light the fire,’ I said to the vendor.
The headline stopped me in my tracks. ‘JERSEY ERGAB SICH!’ Jersey has surrendered. The heat drained from my body in an instant. There it was in black and white. Germany had invaded Jersey.
I read on, only vaguely aware of the other people passing by. In St Helier, bombers had attacked the harbour. Had Céline been there? She enjoyed a stroll on the quay, looking at the boats on her way to the market. ‘Mooching,’ she called it.
I read and re-read it, unable to decide what to do. Finally, I stuffed the paper in my pocket and began to run back towards my apartment. What about our shop? If anything had happened to Céline, I would…
Could I ask Vogt? I had strict orders not to contact him unless sent for.
Berenice. She might have a radio, might be able to tell me what was happening on Jersey. I broke into a faster run, dodging pedestrians. A German soldier turned to look at me sharply. Panting, I slowed to a brisk walk. Somehow I had to get a message to Céline, find out if she was all right. By the time I arrived at the café, my armpits were soaked with sweat, not from running, but from fear. I strode past the tables of customers to the counter. The other Germans in their uniforms looked at me with a disinterest that made me want to punch them. I arrived panting at the counter. Berenice was making out a bill. Her eyes widened at the sight of me.
‘What?’ she said.
‘I need to find out what happened in Jersey. My home. My wife.’
‘Your wife?’ She was confused. ‘You didn’t tell us —’
‘I know, I know. It’s complicated. But I need to find out. I mean, have you a radio?’
‘Hush. Keep your voice down.’ Her matter-of-fact voice calmed me. ‘Be calm. I’ll do what I can. Take this coffee and go back outside. When the officers have gone, I’ll come and fetch you. Then we can talk.’ I was about to protest, but she pushed the coffee towards me.
I took a deep breath and went to find a table alone, where I sipped the bitter coffee, my leg tapping an involuntary tattoo of impatience. True to her word, when the officers had gone Berenice appeared.
‘Quickly,’ she said. ‘Follow me.’
She led me through a side door of the café that went up some narrow stairs to the apartment above. I was too panicked to notice anything except that one wall housed an enormous bookcase and a sideboard held a pile of gramophone records and a player. From a cupboard she pulled out a small Bakelite radio and turned the dial to tune it in.
‘It’s tuned to Radio Londres, not Radio Paris. I don’t know if you’ll hear anything about Jersey, but it’s your best hope. You can only listen for a short while, fifteen minutes, and with the volume very low. If anyone finds out we are listening to that and not Radio Paris, we can be arrested. Understood? Tune it back when you’re finished.’
‘Thank you. I’ll be careful.’
‘And Édouard, I hope she’s all right.’
Berenice disappeared downstairs, then back to her customers, leaving me alone with the radio.
I pressed my ear close to it. It was playing an old French tune, one Céline and I had often heard at fetes and festivals on the island. It gave me a sweet pang of nostalgia. But after fifteen minutes, I still had no more news about Jersey, just more news about Vichy France and how it was doing little to help the occupied half of the country. Pétain apparently wanted the occupation to be peaceful with no more bloodshed, a sentiment I couldn’t help but agree with.
Reluctantly, I switched the thing off. It was tempting to keep listening, but Berenice had been kind; I couldn’t betray her trust. If Céline were in trouble, surely I would feel something? I listened, straining for some sort of instinctive response. Nothing. The best I could do was to send her a sort of prayer, though I wasn’t much of a believer these days. Science had knocked that out of me. But I sent a yearning hope she was well.
I imagined her sitting with her library book, knees tucked under her skirt, on the proddy rug in front of our fire. She was right. We should have fled to England. But even then there’d be no safe place for me there, not as an enemy of the state.
‘Nothing?’ asked Berenice when I came down.
I shook my head. She rested a hand on my arm. ‘You would hear if anything was wrong. Try not to worry.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. I hated the look of sympathy in her eyes.
But when Freitag came later in the week for my files, I slipped in a letter to Vogt, asking him if he could find out for me if Céline was okay. I received no reply, and there was nothing in the new folder the next week to indicate he had ever received my note. I ground my teeth and cursed him, but I knew it would do no good.
From then on it got no easier, but I developed a routine that helped me stave off the worst feelings of not knowing. Breakfast at the café, followed by my translation work, followed by a long walk in the city. I liked my new trim waist, and the feeling of good health that fitness gave me. I refused to carry the gun Vogt had given me. I left it in my apartment drawer, because I worried it might fall from my pocket and give me away to Berenice. In the late afternoon, I’d go back to the café and go through the menus with her, trying to find some way of making the ever-dwindling supplies make a meal. ‘La débrouille’, she called it. Resourcefulness.
One day in the kitchen, she asked me about Céline. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were married?’
‘I suppose I just wanted to keep her out of it,’ I lied. ‘I didn’t want the Germans to hear her name.’
‘You could have told me. After all, it’s what friends are for.’ It was a gentle reprimand, but I still felt guilty.
In fact, I told her hardly anything. I was on my guard the whole time, as if to relax even a little might lead to some faux pas I could never undo. What with that and the struggle to keep on top of the language, I had become a stiff and humourless person, the very opposite of the easy-going man I’d been on Jersey. Even with Berenice, I felt we couldn’t quite be friends, that her gentle probing might lead me to crumble altogether.
CHAPTER 12
Céline
And so it began. Months of new regulations, and by Christmas there were four thousand German troops on the island and a programme of fortification began. I couldn’t get used to seeing it. When I cycled down to the town, I passed platoons of soldiers marching up the road on their training drills, or German trucks ferrying bags of cement. It seemed so odd, with the blackbirds still singing away, oblivious to these interlopers in our midst.
Many things had to change. In the next six months our libraries were censored, the village school had to teach German, and the newspapers’ front pages were devoted to German victories. Our clocks changed to make us part of French time, and suddenly cars had to drive on the right.
For a while we did our best to ignore it all. As food became scarcer, the best bread was sent to feed the Germans, and the grandest houses on the island were taken over by German high command.
Of course, to Jersey people they were always the enemy, but to me I couldn’t help but think of them as Fred’s countrymen, and it made me uneasy to be both patriotic and a traitor to my country at the same time.
We came to dread the knock at the door which meant we had to open it before someone broke it down. One day the knock came just as I was taking the kettle off the hob and it made me jump so hard that scalding water shot out of the spout and over my arm. I opened the door to find two uniformed Germans there, one tall with sandy hair, the other thickset and darker.
‘Have you a wireless?’ The taller one asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it isn’t working.’ I mentally crossed my fingers they’d believe me.
‘Show me.’ He stepped over the threshold without an invitation and I backed away as they both came in. They made me nervous in the way big dogs did, that they might suddenly do something savage and unexpected.
I pointed them towards the sideboard, where the wireless sat in its usual place, and they walked over and switched it on. Nothing.
‘See,’ I said. ‘It’s broken. It’s not working.’ The fuse was in my purse.
‘We will take it anyway,’ he said. ‘All radios are forbidden.’
‘But it was my husband’s,’ I said. ‘He’s a soldier like you in the German army. He won’t like it if he comes home to find it gone.’
I might as well not have spoken. The shorter man unplugged it from the wall, but I lunged towards him and grabbed the set in my arms. My scalded arm burned, but I clung on.
‘No! It was a gift; I know it’s broken, but it has sentimental value,’ I protested. I was desperate. How would I get any news of the war in France without the wireless?
‘Put it down,’ the taller one said.
I gaped at him. He was pointing a gun right at me. Even here in my own sitting room.
Slowly, very slowly, my eyes fixed on him, I lowered it to the ground. The shorter man picked it up and I watched him walk away with the Bakelite box under his arm. The other man kept the gun trained on me, with a superior smirk on his face. When they’d left the house, I looked out of the shop window to see them swaggering away, the wire with its two-pin plug still trailing on the road.
The sight of it made me feel powerless, as if I’d lost more than just the radio. I went to the kitchen table and thumped my fists down on it as hard as I could until I was hot and breathless. It still didn’t ease the feeling of frustration, and even my scalded arm seemed trivial compared to the anger welling up inside.
Later that day, Rachel came by the shop on her way to work.
‘I try to act normal,’ she confided, ‘but I can’t. I still can’t get used to the way they parade about, as if they own the place, and us with it.’ She saw my arm, which I’d wrapped in a wet tea-towel. ‘What happened to your arm?’
‘I scalded it. But it’s nothing.’
‘Let’s look.’
I unwrapped it to show her the blister and she sucked in her breath.
‘Ouch.’
‘They’ve confiscated my wireless,’ I said.
‘Oh no. What happened?’
‘I made a bit of a scene. The soldier actually threatened me. With a gun.’
She was incredulous. ‘Here?’
‘Yes. It was my fault. I didn’t want to let it go. But still, I can’t get over it. He would have shot me for my wireless. I couldn’t take it in, that my life was on the line for something so small.’
‘It’s happening all over. They’ve banned them. I hoped somehow they’d never get to you.’
‘But how the heck will we know what’s going on in the outside world?’
‘That’s just it. They don’t want us to know, do they?’
CHAPTER 13
Paris, October 1941
Fred
For a while I heard nothing of Antoine (or was he Pierre?). Nor for that matter did I see Vogt or my German masters, and in one way I was glad. I had a routine of helping Berenice at the café; I’d lay tables or clear away, or wash pots for the pleasure of some company. It was an odd and lonely existence working for invisible paymasters with no colleagues to talk to. I missed Céline, and with no news from home I feared what she might think of me now the Germans had taken over Jersey. Freitag appeared regularly at my door with a fresh folder of translations. Sometimes another Frenchman brought them, a wiry pimpled youth who introduced himself as Foucault. A youth in the pay of Vogt, obviously. I did my work thoroughly and efficiently and hoped to be as invisible as possible.
Many of the German pronouncements made me fidget as I tried not to be the man who put them into French. Some documents were for Section IV, what Freitag called the Funkspiel, or Radio Game. Captured Allied wireless sets were being used to transmit fake messages to try to flush out enemy radio operators and members of French Resistance groups. Whoever did the transmissions would have to have perfect English, I thought. So many agents. Were they willing, or had they been ‘persuaded’ just like me? As the months went by, I realised that these men rarely lasted more than a dozen messages before their signal was found, and I was both grateful not to be one of them, and guilty about my part in translating the messages.
Today I was to translate another batch of these transmissions. In one way, it was fascinating. In another, harrowing. My translations could mean life or death for these people. I thought of the interrogation cells at Avenue Foch and closed my eyes. Céline was right; I should have resisted joining the army. I wasn’t much good as either a soldier or a spy.
When I’d finished my work, I was forced to queue with the rest of the French for my rations in an icy wind. As a single man, with a supposedly weak heart, and no hard manual labour, my entitlement was meagre. The waiting was long, the day bitter, and my feet were numb by the time I got my quota of milk and bread and climbed the stairs to my curiously deserted apartment block. Two other Jewish families had lived there, but both had fled. Now only one elderly Frenchman remained, and me.
I stared at the table. A large crate had appeared beside another folder of translations. My previous work had gone, even though it was only half-finished. Someone had been in here. Someone — someone other than me — must have a key to this apartment. And if they had a key, then nothing I owned would ever be private. Of course, I should have known they would keep an eye on me.
I peered in the box. A small pat of butter, a few rinds of bacon wrapped in greaseproof paper, a small German sausage, some earthy carrots, a screw-top bottle of peas and a jar of red jam: the provisions they’d promised. If I’d known, it would have saved me queueing.
With my fingers still clumsy with cold, I pulled out a small
bottle of brandy and put it to one side. Thank God they thought this essential. If there was one thing I needed right now, this was it. I unscrewed the top and took a large swig. The fumes in my throat made me wheeze, but the warmth began to thaw my stiff muscles. The taste reminded me of Céline, of how we sometimes used to stroll to the harbour before coming back to our nightcap of cocoa and brandy. Maybe I’d pour myself a nightcap later. I hated to eat on my own; I missed Céline, and I missed Jersey, where everyone knew me and I didn’t need to keep watching my step in case I forgot to be Édouard Vibert.
I was too worried that I was being watched to stay indoors. I needed distraction. What to do? I rummaged through the food on the table. It was hardly a feast, yet already I was conjuring a recipe, so I packed it all back in the box, except for the brandy which, given the weather, was too tempting to give away. I carried the box over to Les Deux Pigeons. For the first time, I looked over my shoulder to check I wasn’t being followed. The fact someone had been in my apartment made me cautious.
The café was quiet. Few soldiers ate in restaurants in the middle of the day. I took the box through and stood it on the counter. ‘A few extras for tonight’s menu,’ I said.
Berenice picked through the contents. ‘My God. Bacon. And butter!’ Her eyes lit up. ‘Where did you get these?’
‘An aunt of mine,’ I improvised. ‘She lives in the country. It was a gift. I’d like to share it.’
‘Nice aunt. Brandy too, by the smell of you. But I can’t give you anything for it,’ she said, pushing the box back towards me. ‘In fact, I’ve been told to call it a day. Been given my notice.’
‘What? You’re giving up the café?’ The thought of it hurt me, as if I’d had to give up my own shop. ‘But you said you’d never give up. What about those two old guys who come every day?’
The Occupation Page 10