A Troubled Peace

by L. M. Elliott

  Only then did Madame look up at Henry. “C’est très beau, n’est-ce pas?”

  Henry nodded. “What was that, Madame?”

  “Mendelssohn’s ‘Consolation’ from Songs Without Words. It is hard to understand how a nation that spawned him, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, can listen to Hitler. How a people who make such music can exterminate an entire race of people. Angels and devils in the same soul.”

  Gently, she reached to touch Henry’s hand. “Now, mon ami, why are you here? I sent you home. As glad as I am to see you, you disappoint me.”

  Henry quavered. Her concern was such an invitation to spill his soul. But he stopped himself. He could not burden her, in this depleted state, with his nightmares, the wild actions that had driven him back to France. He’d reclaimed that much self-control and recognition at least. So he told her about Pierre, about Pierre’s mother. “Her brother said they would send her to Ravensbruck. Do you think she survived?”

  Madame’s face clouded. “Do you know her name?”

  Henry only knew the boy’s first name. Wait—the priest had said Pierre Dubois. Did she know a Dubois in her late twenties, very pretty, dark eyes, petite in size? What an idiot he’d been not to learn her first name.

  Madame smiled sadly and shook her head. That description fit hundreds. “If she is young, hopefully she was strong. She would have to be strong. Every several weeks we all had to lift our skirts to our hips and run in front of the SS guards and doctors. Women who were too weak to run, or were slow, or had swollen feet or legs, were pulled aside to be transported to Mittweida. The guards said there was a place for them to recover. In truth they were gassed to death in the transport trucks.”

  Henry thought he would vomit. “I am so sorry, Madame. I feel like this is my fault.” Henry poured out the story of the Gestapo’s interrogation, of the SS officer holding up a scarf and saying they held a woman they suspected had aided him, of his managing to kill the Nazi and escape.

  Madame stopped him. “Then, you see, chéri. Your escaping the Gestapo did save me.” Her smile was incredibly generous, like a Madonna’s in the paintings that had once graced her house along with the jumbled up Picasso. Henry remembered her talking of her romance with the painter and how, on the day that he left, the Picasso was gone—sold to finance his escape. Henry owed this woman so much. And she was still trying to help him. “The worst part was Herr Barbie, in Lyon,” she continued. “He told me he was going to hang me with an American they had just picked up. Then he never mentioned it again—which was a small victory that buoyed me with hope. It clearly was you. Since you were clever enough to escape, they could not use you against me. Merci, mon chevalier. Once I arrived in Ravensbruck, it was not so bad.”

  Henry felt a wave of redemption that somehow his actions may have helped her even a little. But he wasn’t so sure that Ravensbruck was “not so bad.” “You lie to make me feel better, Madame.”

  “Oh, only a little lie, chéri,” she teased. “You call them ‘white lies’ do you not? Such an odd expression. Why white? White is pure. It should be gray, or pink perhaps, tinged only slightly with the red of deception. I have never understood the metaphors of English. It is a hard language to grasp. Oh, and mon Dieu, your Americanisms. Pff!” For a moment, Madame was once again the witty woman who fliers would follow anywhere, completely trusting in her clever courage and put-on drama.

  Then she sobered. “But it was English that saved me in the camp. My knowledge of German, French, and English. There were so many nationalities—Poles, Russians, German Jews, Dutch, gypsies, captured SOE agents—they used me as a translator. So I avoided the worst labor. Other women had to pull huge iron rollers to pave streets, dig ditches and canals to drain the marshes, clear forests. Each day, twelve hours of backbreaking work. They could not do that for long on what we were fed—a half pint of brown water they called coffee, one pint of beet soup, and a fist-sized hunk of bread. That was all for the day. We tried to survive on dandelions we could pick through the barbed wire, by drinking water we drained off their truck engines when the guards weren’t looking. We salivated over the single sausage we were granted once a week. But for most it was not enough. Many dropped dead as they labored, and were left to rot.

  “Better that death, perhaps, than the experiments. That was the worst thing I had to do, to explain their plans to infect women with bacteria, to sever their nerves, to break their bones to see how or if they would heal. To translate the lie that if the prisoners agreed to such tests or to be sterilized, they would be freed. I tried to warn them, I tried.” Madame gagged and held her hand to her mouth.

  “Don’t, Madame. Don’t try to tell me any more.”

  She was trembling. “No.” Her voice was hoarse. “You must hear. You must tell your countrymen. Already people do not want to acknowledge, cannot face what was done. But they must if we are to prevent it from happening again. The horror of it will keep us vigilant.”

  “You are a remarkable woman, Madame. I don’t know how you survived.”

  Madame closed her eyes and ran her fingers along the tops of the piano keys. “I remembered this,” she whispered. “I remembered my son’s laughter. I recited poetry I knew by heart. I refused to weep. Those who cried at night were dead the next morning.

  “I built a safe fortress with my memories, an inner peace that came from knowing that I had done what had to be done.” She opened her eyes and looked at Henry, a flicker of energy left in them. “Camus wrote that man’s grandeur lies in his decision to rise above his condition. ‘There is no fate that cannot be surmounted with scorn.’ Do you know his writing?”

  Henry did not.

  “Hmmm. You must. Look on my shelf. See if you find Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Perhaps the Nazis left that. Yes, is that it?” Henry was holding up a thin volume. “Take that with you.”

  “It’s in French, Madame.”

  “C’est vrai. It will improve your French skills. You will have plenty of time to work through it on the train to Paris. It is merely a long essay. Camus is important for you to know. He was in the Resistance, editor of the underground paper Combat. The next to last line of this book is most inspiring: ‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.’” She nodded to herself. “The struggle itself.’ Oui.” Madame drifted off in thought.

  “Wait,” Henry was focused on something else she’d said, not on the literature. “A train to Paris, Madame?”

  “Oui. I suspect that is where you will find your Pierre—at the station where the liberated prisoners return. Thousands will come through in the next few weeks and months. I was released early, one of almost three hundred women the Nazis selected to be exchanged for German prisoners de Gaulle held in France. I was selected because my Swiss friends had continued to protest my arrest. We were thought to be the most presentable, the least damaged, to soften the reality of the camps. I suppose we were—only eleven of us died during the train trip.

  “I do not think people awaiting us knew what was to come. They held lilacs and lipsticks and face powder to give us, thinking we’d merely be tired from a long journey and want to freshen up. They did not know that our hair had been shaved like sheep to make yarn for sweaters, that we were covered with lice and sores, that our teeth were rotted, that we were consumed with dysentery, TB. A man asked one of my friends, who could barely stand, where her luggage was. Imagine! She handed him all she had, a black sweater tied in a bundle to protect belongings she had counted over and over again. I can recite the contents after hearing it so often—two safety pins, a ball of twine, a shard of soap, a button, one aspirin tablet, a pencil nub, a comb, a match. These were treasures in camp.

  “We sang ‘The Marseillaise’ as we stepped off that train. Such off-key joy we had. But the crowd could not join us, they wept so in shock at us.”

  She quieted. Henry could barely hear her final instructions. “At the station, I saw children holding signs with their names written on them, hoping their mothers woul
d step off the train and see them. Or that one of us would know something of their parents’ fate. Pauvres enfants. Look there. At Gare de l’Est. Or at Hotel Lutetia, where the returnees go if no one awaits them at the station.”

  Henry caught her as she swayed and almost toppled off the piano bench. Gently he lifted her. She didn’t weigh more than a couple bags of feed. As he settled her on the sofa, François came in with a tray—soup for Henry and a tiny portion of thin, oatmeal-like gruel for Madame.

  Gratefully, Henry tasted his vegetable soup. Madame’s stories of her deprivation had made him hungry. François was right. He wasn’t a very good cook. But Henry was happy to not be eating Spam for one night anyway.

  François pulled up a footstool to sit in front of his mother, intently watching as she lifted the spoon. She looked so resigned, uninterested. Henry was sure if the soup was poor, the gruel was terrible. So he was surprised to see her reaction as she slipped the teaspoon past her cracked lips. Madame brightened and flushed. She rolled that mouthful around and around before swallowing.

  Her son beamed.

  “I tasted that little bit of cherry, my darling.” Even though painfully soft and low, her voice was playful, like she was sharing a secret. “It tasted like…like…a miracle. Like seeing you—a miracle.”

  “I remembered that if I begged hard enough that you would give me cake for breakfast sometimes, Mother. How could I refuse you the season’s first cherries? Je t’aime, Maman. Now, there are two cherries in this bowl. Cut up very small. But you must eat all this gruel to have them.” François said the last in a singsongy voice parents used to coax children to take medicine.

  Madame responded with a tiny chortle that resonated in the room as beautifully as the piano music had. Her son was radiant. All over a few teaspoons of gruel and a thimbleful of cherries.

  Henry tiptoed out.

  The next morning, early, as the sun was just beginning to reach over the garden walls to warm the sanctuary inside, Henry finished weeding. He’d been out since five A.M. or so, awakened earlier by the sound of violent coughing, doors opening and shutting, someone knocking loudly on the front door, feet running up the stairs. Something had happened.

  Weeding kept his dread in check.

  When he was completely done, he plucked a lily of the valley to press into the Camus book. He wanted Lilly to see what her song was about. He flipped the pages. The writing was short, but in highfalutin French. It would take some doing for him to puzzle it out. But Madame thought he should, so he would.

  François found him. “Henri, come here.”

  He looked exhausted. Henry approached him warily.

  François pressed one of Madame’s delicate scarves into Henry’s hand. It was a deep forest green, etched with ferns and flowers. Henry recognized it as the one she had worn when he had pretended to be her chauffeur.

  “Oh, no,” Henry shook his head. “She has given me way too much already.” He tried to give it back.

  François closed Henry’s hands around the beautiful silk. “I insist. She wanted you to have this. To take home to your maman.”

  Wanted? Henry tried to push away the word’s implication, the feeling of a chord of music resonating and then fading away. He forced cheeriness: “I am going to follow her advice and go to Paris. May I say good-bye to her?”

  But François’s face told him before he said it. Madame Gaulloise was dead.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  On the train to Paris, Henry ached. The hurt spread from his heart, through his breathing, to every inch of his being. Madame’s mischievous delight in outwitting the Nazis had made her seem invincible. But war wasn’t a game, was it? No one—not even the bravest, the most resilient, the most clever and idealistic—was untouchable. Henry tried to cling to the fact that the Nazis had not sullied Madame’s spirit—that had remained indestructible.

  François’s plea that Henry make himself worthy of Madame’s sacrifice hounded him. Clearly, the beginning of answering that tall order was to snap-to. “Straighten up and fly right,” as the Nat King Cole song went. “Cool down, papa, don’t you blow your top.”

  That and to find Pierre. If Pierre’s mother were in the same shape as Madame, he would desperately need Henry’s help. Saving that small life would have made Madame happy, Henry knew. And at least that might be a small counterweight to the heft of her loss.

  Without hesitation, Henry shelled out twenty-five dollars for the train ticket. He had to hurry. He couldn’t waste a week hiking or hoping to hitch a ride. Every day trains pulled into Paris that could carry Pierre’s mother or the news that she was dead. Henry’s heart told him that Paris was where Pierre would be, waiting, looking, if he were…Henry shut down that thought before his mind could whisper the doubt that Pierre was alive.

  Henry refused to do the math of his finances or worry about the cost of a Paris hotel. At least he had nine days of Spam left. Right now he was just living day by day, making things up as he went along. There wasn’t any flight plan for this journey.

  To distract himself, Henry pulled out Madame’s book. It was short—only four chapters—but hard going. He’d never before read much French literature. His teacher, Miss Dixon, had given him a copy of Le Petit Prince when she learned he had joined up to be a pilot. She’d said it would be good luck for her “prize French student,” since a little prince from a faraway asteroid guarded a pilot who crash-landed in the Sahara Desert. Henry had muddled through it, translating a sentence or two per page so that he got the gist of the story. The watercolor illustrations helped, he had to admit. After reading it, though, Henry had left it at home, feeling that a book about a pilot going down, even to crash-land safely, was bad luck.

  Le Petit Prince had been poetic and simple. This book by Camus was dense and philosophical. Still, Henry managed to understand that Camus felt life was absurd and meaningless and that hoping for a better tomorrow only made it more so. Science and logic could not explain the world. Henry agreed with that. But, gee whiz, how depressing could you get? He closed the book and stuffed it back into his bag.

  Blasting whistles told him that the train would soon pull into Lyon. Henry shifted in his seat, cramped by the bodies packed in the enclosed riding compartment. His knees touched the man’s sitting opposite, and he was sandwiched between two older, very round, country women. The man and the women seemed to know one another and gossiped nonstop. Henry drifted in time, their voices swirling around him, as he listened to the memory of Madame playing the piano.

  It was the smell that stopped his daydreaming. A horrible smell. What the heck was that?

  Henry sniffed, wrinkling his nose in disgust. He looked around the compartment, to the lady to his left, the one to his right, the man across, wondering if they could smell what he did. They looked back. Their faces seemed to carry a sudden, put-on innocence. Like the look he and his friends had masked themselves with when one of them hit their peevish seventh-grade teacher in the back of the head with a spitball.

  Henry took another good whiff and fought off a gag. It almost smelled like Mr. Campbell’s barn back home when he slaughtered pigs for market.

  The smell came from above. He glanced up at the suitcase rack over the window, scanning the pile of hatboxes, cardboard suitcases, and carpetbags. Was he seeing straight? One of those bags had a dark red splotch in its bottom corner. As Henry studied it—jeepers!—a large drop of blood oozed out of it and slid down the wall.

  Henry jumped up. “Do you see that?” He pointed.

  Everyone in the car looked at him blankly.

  “Aw, come on, people. Don’t you see that? Don’t you smell it? It’s blood. Du sang.” Henry’s mind reeled. Given all that he’d heard about in the past few days, he imagined a chopped-up body inside the tapestry bag.

  When Henry reached for it, the man across from him stood and slapped his arm away, telling him to keep his hands off. “Sinon on va penser que vous êtes un voleur.”

  “Thief? I’m no thief, mister. Wh
at’s in there?”

  The man glanced nervously at his companions. Henry realized everyone else in the compartment was in on whatever was concealed in the bag. The situation felt like a scene in a Hitchcock suspense film, where the one character who wasn’t in the know was quickly disposed of or framed to seem the insane one. Well, that wasn’t going to happen to him.

  Henry lunged for the bag. But the man knocked him back to the bench. One of the women grabbed his arm. She held her finger to her lips. “Shhhhhh.”

  Shush? You’ve gotta be kidding! Henry was about to shout out, when the compartment’s glass and wooden door swooshed open. The conductor entered, accompanied by two French policemen, one short and pudgy, the other tall and muscular.

  “Hey! Over here!” Henry pointed to the blood, but the policemen were way ahead of him, as if they knew exactly what to look for and where. One pulled down the bag and opened it. Henry held his breath to look, half expecting to see a decapitated head. Massive shanks of lamb were inside, pooled in blood, recently butchered. The other officer undid the hatboxes to reveal stacked wheels of cheese.

  “Des porteurs de valise,” the police muttered and nodded. Henry’s compartment-mates were black marketers, “suitcase-bearers.” The policemen prodded them and Henry with thick sticks. “Vous êtes tous en état d’arrestation. Venez avec nous!”

  “Wait, you can’t arrest me,” Henry said. He pushed back, prompting the brawny policeman to grab him up under his armpit, lifting him to his toes. “Listen, I had nothing to do with this. I don’t know these people. I was just sitting here.”

  “Ah, oui? Open your bag for inspection.” The portly policeman switched to English.

  “Gladly.” Henry untied his duffel bag, without thinking about its contents. Out spilled his SPAM, his cigarettes, and the ration card for bread.