A Troubled Peace

by L. M. Elliott

  “Mon Dieu. C’est toi! Henri!”

  A girl with amber cat-eyes smothered him with kisses.

  His mind spinning from the whack to his head and the embrace, Henry pushed her away, completely befuddled.

  “Ah, once, you did not mind my kisses, Henri. Do you not know me? It is Claudette.”

  Henry stared. “Claudette?”

  “Oui, oui! I thought you were dead. When you lured away those soldiers so that I could escape the Nazis, I feared they would shoot you. I cannot believe you live!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Henry had forgotten how insistent, how fiery, Claudette was. But it came back quickly as she pulled on his arm and demanded that he meet her friends. “I told them that an American saved me from capture. They must see that you survive. C’est un miracle!” She wasn’t about to let go of his arm. And remembering how she’d flattened the Resistance fighter who had tried to run her out of the maquis camp, Henry wasn’t about to argue.

  He had not forgotten her beauty. She reminded him now of the Grecian-style marble women that held up the arches of the Opera House. With a long straight nose and high cheekbones, Claudette had a dramatic profile very like those of the chiseled statues. Her thick black eyebrows arched naturally, with none of that silly plucking the glamour girls did back home to create pencil-thin lines. Her almond-shaped eyes were large and that unnerving yellow-green color. But it was her full lips that made her so exotic-looking. Patsy had lips like that, too, and seemed just as unaware as Claudette of how pretty they were.

  Patsy. Henry felt a sudden pang of homesickness. And then a little twinge of guilt for appreciating Claudette’s looks. Well, heck, he thought, Pats had turned him down, hadn’t she? And here was this gorgeous French girl who was thrilled to see him. He pushed Patsy’s memory aside and followed Claudette.

  Claudette led them to a Metro stop, where she replaced her roller skates with wooden clogs she pulled from a straw bag. “No leather for slippers yet.” She sighed. “These are so heavy. I prefer to skate, but I cannot walk stairs in them.”

  As she changed, a man crept from the dark stairwell, holding out a Hershey bar. “Du chocolat américain,” he hissed. “Soixante francs.”

  Henry stepped forward, instinctively shielding Claudette. But she brushed past him to hit the black marketer in the chest with her roller skates. “Cochon!”

  The man howled in pain.

  She swatted him again. “Black-marketers should get the death penalty! You sell things at such prices that we must bankrupt ourselves to eat. Because of you, children starve! Thief!”

  Henry almost laughed. This was precisely what he recalled most about Claudette—a tiny spitfire taking on a squadron of enemies. But he also remembered that her self-righteous bravery threw her into danger constantly. Just as Claudette hauled off to hit the man again, he pulled a knife out of his pocket. The man jabbed at her, narrowly missing as Henry yanked her away and punched him in the face.

  The man stumbled back spitting blood. All that boxing Henry’s dad had forced him to do finally paid off! He’d have to remember to tell Clayton. Henry held up his fists—ready. “Come on!” But the man ran off instead, hurling insults at Claudette.

  Claudette’s eyes shone. She did love a fight, didn’t she?

  “I see you have regained your strength,” she said. “No longer the half-starved boy I found stealing from my orchard.” She took his hand again and led him down the dark stairs to the underground trains. They paid for second class, but she talked them into first, settling down on the upholstered benches with a sigh of contentment.

  As the train rattled through the pitch-black tunnels, Claudette’s lips brushed his again. “That is for saving my life for a second time,” she whispered.

  “Oh, that wasn’t saving your life,” Henry said of the man in the Metro. “You would have been all right.”

  “You are too modest, Henri.” She kissed him again, then pulled back and looked at him with puzzlement. “Why do you not return my kisses? Are you not happy to see me?”

  “Lord, yes! I am so glad to see you, Claudette. You have no idea.”

  “Then why—?” She broke off abruptly, remembering. “Ah. The American girl, oui? Did you marry?”

  Henry smiled ruefully. Ironically, the moment he and Claudette kissed in the Morvan a year ago was the moment when Henry realized clearly that he was, in fact, in love with Patsy. “No, we have not married.” He paused, then added, “She turned me down.”

  “Oh, Henri,” Claudette said sympathetically. “Then she is a fool.” Claudette kissed him on the cheek.

  This time Henry kissed her back.

  They exited the Metro in the Montmartre district, climbing a hilltop of stairs to a huge, white, domed church that looked like something from India. “Basilique du Sacre Coeur,” Claudette identified it when Henry paused to catch his breath and gawk a bit. “It was built to honor French soldiers who died in the Franco-Prussian War. But it was not completed until 1914, in time for us to mourn the one and a half million lost in the First World War. And now we grieve for more.”

  They both gazed up at its towers.

  “You know, I haven’t done any sightseeing here at all. I should at least see the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame and…and the Louvre.” He felt strange about listing the museum to Claudette, since Patsy was the reason he wanted to go.

  “It opens again next week,” Claudette told him. “I will take you.”

  For a moment he wondered if he should see her again, but only for a moment. Henry replied enthusiastically, “That’s a date.”

  They began to walk on, but Claudette stopped. “Henri, why are you here if not to sightsee like the other American soldiers?”

  He told her about Pierre, about the Lutetia.

  “So, you are still the savior,” she said with quiet seriousness.

  Henry shook his head. “Not me, Claudette. I’m no savior. I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for Pierre, or Madame Gaulloise, or you.” He kissed her hand. “And to tell you the truth, an old German soldier. He took me out to a field on orders to shoot me. I had to dig my own grave. And then…” Henry paused remembering how he’d put down his shovel and closed his eyes and tried to lift his soul onto the winds, like a kite, waiting for the gunshot that would end his life. “Then he just told me to go home.”

  “What?”

  “I know. I couldn’t believe it either. He told me to go home and pointed me west. American tanks were about ten miles off. The brass always told us to try to find regular German army if we had to turn ourselves in—to save us from the SS and Gestapo. They even said some old-school officers tried to overthrow Hitler. That old sergeant who let me go wasn’t a Hitler fanatic. He was clearly a World War One veteran defending the fatherland again. I think he just decided that he’d had enough killing.”

  For a moment, Henry remembered the soldier’s sad old face. “You know,” he added quietly, “I heard a deportee tell a nurse today that she had survived the march from one slave-labor camp to another because a German woman put out a trough of hot, cooked potatoes for the prisoners to take one as they passed. That woman risked a lot to do that, don’t you think?”

  “Mon Dieu.” Claudette’s face flushed. “I have never considered such things possible from les boches. We must give thanks for your life, Henri.” She led Henry into the church. They knelt before a huge mosaic of Christ with outstretched arms that glowed in the candlelight.

  Claudette clasped her hands. Henry heard her whisper a prayer asking to shed her hatred. He glanced over at her in surprise. Nazis had murdered her mother and executed thirty people in her village on the word of a neighbor who accused them of feeding the maquis hiding nearby. He remembered well her desire to kill every Nazi she could, her calling him a fool for believing in God. “If God exists,” she’d said bitterly, “how could all this happen?”

  Back then, Henry had told Claudette that she must not act in revenge, that if she did, she would be as dead insid
e as if the Nazis shot her. But now, seeing the complete annihilation of the Vercors, the death of Madame, and the starved and haunted at the Lutetia, Henry was feeling similar rage, despite the German soldier, despite the one woman with her potatoes who’d been brave enough to be kind. He was ashamed of it but did not have the force to suppress it, not yet.

  Neither he nor Claudette managed a real prayer. Within a few minutes they stood and left, Henry wondering if he’d ever completely heal that way.

  Behind the basilica, Montmartre moaned with music. Claudette’s mood shifted instantly upon hearing it. “Jazz is back,” Claudette said, grinning, “and dancing. They were forbidden as disrespectful while the war continued. Now with victory in Europe, we can dance again. I will put on my good dress and we will go. Yes?”

  Henry was game.

  Claudette lived on a narrow, damp back street. Her concierge was as uninviting as the house. “Yes, but she knew how to be vague when the Gestapo searched,” Claudette whispered as they climbed to the third floor. “All my friends were Resistance. My roommate made false papers. The boys down the hall worked on Combat with Camus.”

  Madame Gaulloise’s Camus? “Hey, I have a book of his and—” He stopped short when Claudette tapped once, paused, and then added a sequence of: tap…tap, tap-tap, before opening the door.

  “Why the signal?” Henry lowered his voice.

  Claudette smiled self-consciously. “Habit. Surprise was something we did not like.”

  It was a tiny room with a narrow, rolled-arm couch, a cane-seat chair, and small table with one candle on it. That was it. A cracked window opened onto an alley festooned with underwear drying on lines strung up between clay pot chimneys. Henry thought of Claudette’s beautiful old house and orchards in the Morvan and asked the same question she had of him: “Why are you here in Paris?”

  “To be part of the change, Henri! It is our chance to change France for good. I work for the UFF, Union des Femmes Françaises. We print our newspaper. We speak out for jobs and equal pay for women. We demand the government provide good child care so that mothers can work and not fear for their babies. This October, the country will elect the Constituent Assembly. I campaign for the women who wish to be elected.”

  She pulled two jars from the cupboard. “All I have is applesauce and canned peas, oh, and prune liqueur. Would you like a little? In a few days I will queue for more. I am a J-three, between fifteen and twenty-one years of age. I am granted four eggs a month and three hundred fifty grams of bread a day, plus all the turnips and rutabagas I can carry away, so I am not bad off. They want young people to regain strength. We have much work to do!” she echoed le patron.

  Tap…tap, tap-tap. Claudette’s roommate entered.

  “Giselle.” Claudette nearly hopped up and down. “This is Henri! The flier I told you about. The man who saved my life! He is alive. Can you believe?”

  The roommate eyed Henry. She did not smile. Unlike the vivacious Claudette, this girl’s personality was as thin as her frame. She’d survived the war, but clearly just barely. Mechanically, she held out her hand to shake Henry’s.

  Claudette made Old World introductions: “Henri, this is Giselle Balmain. Giselle, this is Henri…” She stopped. “Ça alors! Henri, I do not know your last name!”

  Claudette recruited five more from their floor to join her celebration. The young men were cold to Henry at first, until Claudette told of Henry’s repairing cars and fusing plastique explosives at the maquis camp. Then the Frenchmen opened up and talked about the battle for Paris, the difficulty in finding petrol to make Molotov cocktails to hurl at German tanks. “Empty wine bottles to put the petrol in? They were simple to find,” they joked. They teased one friend who said he was too tired to dance because he pedaled a stationary bike for hours each day to charge a generator that ran hair dryers in a hair salon. Shrugging good-naturedly, the man told them they should all be so lucky as to find work, especially work surrounded by beautiful women.

  The group traveled from café to cabaret, collecting more friends as they went. They avoided the places they knew for sure served cat meat as beef. The songs the chanteuses sang were throaty and bawdy. The group’s conversation was loud and off-color, opinionated minidramas. They spoke with large gestures and exaggerated facial expressions, leaning close to one another to make a point, far closer than any American would tolerate. They argued hotly about the best ways to improve France’s economy, to make things more equal between the classes and the sexes.

  As Henry listened, he realized that most of them were very left-wing in their thoughts, probably communist, including Claudette. Were these the type of people Thurman was concerned about watching? The type of people Thurman might keep a known Nazi in tow to ferret out? Henry couldn’t see how these passionate, brave young people, devoted to building a better future, could be such a threat to American interests. If Orwell’s paranoia about government was right, Henry would have to be careful around the Hotel Scribe. He didn’t necessarily agree with the philosophies of Claudette and her friends, but the last thing he’d want to do is somehow bring the scrutiny of Thurman and his agents down on these youths. They’d had to watch their backs enough already.

  As the night raced on, Henry tired of politics and focused on Claudette. While the others grew tipsy on the watered-down wine or on their dreams or on the pumped-up jazz beat, Henry lost himself in her, her new joie de vivre. Her bitter rage, her aura of tragedy, had been replaced with high hopes. Her new spirit was intoxicating.

  She pulled him onto the packed dance floor to jitterbug to wildly fast music. They crashed into other dancers, boys grabbing her for a swing around the floor and thrusting other girls into Henry’s arms and then exchanging again—a mass of happy, sweating, sashaying young people in one big dance of unencumbered rejoicing. Claudette’s laugh rang out with the music and Henry realized it was the first time he had ever heard her truly laugh.

  She was so free, so full of youthful joy, she tugged at his heart. When the band switched to a slow ballad, Henry gladly pulled her to him to sway in a music-sweetened embrace. The singer crooned lyrics Henry knew well—the entire Allied world knew well—and had clung to as a hope of things returning to normal when the war was won.

  “When the lights go on again, all over the world,

  And the boys are home again all over the world,

  And rain or snow is all that may fall from the skies above,

  A kiss won’t mean ‘Good-bye’ but ‘Hello to love.’”

  Claudette looked up at him with those cat-amber eyes. He couldn’t take his own away from them.

  As they left the dance hall, an accordion player waved at them, winked, and began singing a World War I song Henry recognized from childhood:

  “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm

  After they’ve seen Paree?…

  They’ll never want to see a rake or plow,

  And who the deuce can parleyvous a cow?

  How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm,

  After they’ve seen Paree?”

  Henry left Claudette right before dawn, with the promise to rendezvous that night. He whistled the accordion player’s song as he made the long walk to the Lutetia and wondered: How indeed could he return to the farm, to shoveling chicken manure, after all this? Could he return to Patsy?

  The sun had risen by the time Henry reached the Lutetia. He dreaded going inside to the DDT, to the legions of sick and lost. He made his way to the board first, almost absentmindedly, because so many days had passed with no mark made on the note to Pierre.

  Henry did a double take before sprinting inside.

  Pierre’s note was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “No, monsieur, I did not take down the note.” Madame Zlatin tried to calm Henry. “Probably the boy took it.”

  Henry kicked himself—what an idiot he had been, larking around with Claudette. He should have been at the Lutetia. He should have been watching. And what was he doin
g there still? He should be on the streets looking for a small figure clutching a scrap of paper. He turned to run, but her words held him. “If Pierre has taken the note, he may come to me later today. If he does not, I will post it again.”

  “But why would he not come in?”

  “He may be afraid someone wants to send him back home. Or”—she patted Henry’s arm, ensuring that he stay still—“he may be afraid that we have news of his mother that is not good. These children sometimes create a fantasy to keep their hope alive. Yesterday a little girl told us with great certainty that her mother had not come yet because she had amnesia and was living as a countess in Hungary. That was her answer when a friend who survived Auschwitz told us the mother had perished.

  “Wait here. A number of women came in this morning from Ravensbruck. We are processing them now. One of my assistants may have found someone who knew a Dubois. I will talk with her.”

  The look on Henry’s face begged her to let him follow.

  “No,” Madame Zlatin answered before he verbalized the request. “It will be easier if it is just me. Sit. Wait.”

  Henry parked himself in the hotel’s main lobby and tried to keep his chair from hopping down the hallway from the impatient tapping of his foot. He made himself study the mosaic ship pressed into the floor with artistically arranged chips of pink, gold, and black marble. Themes of plenty and good fortune were everywhere in the elegant Art Deco hotel. Just below the vaulted ceilings, molded in plaster, ran a lavish grapevine, cascading with plump grape bunches. The staircase leading to the rooms upstairs was lit by sunshine spilling golden through stained-glass windows cut in sunflower bursts that were outlined in thin rays of lead, haloed disc upon disc, like crowded fields of enormous blossoms. The lacework of wrought iron balconies overhanging the lobby was formed into gentle waves lapping other emblems of ships.