The Invisible Woman

by Erika Robuck

  Danielle finally speaks.

  “I still have hope,” she says. “I’m determined to. Besides, I would know if Roger were gone, and I feel him stronger than ever. It’s as if he’s right here with me.”

  Hemon catches Virginia’s eye from across the table. They have an entire conversation with that stare. A tug on her dress turns her attention to the little girl from Danielle’s house.

  “Will you take me to the puppies?” she says.

  Now that the girl is speaking with more confidence, Virginia detects an accent in the child’s French. Is it German? Austrian?

  “I’d love to take you to the puppies,” says Virginia. “As soon as I help get this table cleared.”

  “Go,” says Hemon. “We’ve got it.”

  Virginia nods at him, then rises and takes the girl’s hand. When they get to the barn, Virginia lifts the girl into the stall and climbs in after her.

  “Sit here,” Virginia says. “See which one picks you.”

  Three puppies nurse at their mama, but one gets distracted by the entrance of the humans. It tumbles over and rubs against the little girl’s leg. Virginia picks it up and looks under its soft belly.

  “It’s a boy,” she says. “What will you call him?”

  “Parachute,” the girl says.

  Virginia bursts out with a laugh.

  “Where did you get a name like that?”

  “Papa Le Forestier always said the parachutes brought the good things to Chambon.”

  Virginia feels the sting of tears. She places the dog gently in the girl’s lap to take the attention away from herself. Another puppy soon wanders over, and the girl tells Virginia to name it.

  “I’ll call this one Locomotive,” says Virginia. “Loco, for short.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know the locomotive is what brings the good things to Chambon.”

  The girl looks at her for a long moment before a smile touches her lips. She looks back at the puppy, and starts to run her finger in circles, whipping it and its littermates into a frenzy.

  Soon, the adults gather in the lantern-lit barn. Danielle climbs into the stall to join the children in playing with the puppies.

  “I know I offered my extra rooms to Hemon and Raphael,” Léa says, “but do you have space at your place, Diane? I think Danielle and her children should stay with me for a while.”

  “Of course,” says Virginia. “That makes more sense anyway. Now that we’re allowing the new arrivals to officially join le Corps Franc Diane.”

  Hemon and Raphael cheer as if they’ve won an award. Bob, Dédé, and Edmund slap them on their backs.

  In case they don’t get to see the women and children again, they take their time with good-byes. They’ll be on the move any day now, and they don’t know when they’ll get back. As they climb in the truck and drive away from the farm, Virginia steals one last glance at Léa, Danielle, and the many little heads silhouetted against the last light in the sky. She presses her fingers to her lips and blows them a kiss. They raise their arms in farewell.

  * * *

  —

  After showing Hemon and Raphael to their rooms, Virginia tries to sleep, but she can’t, not with these new men under her roof, and her worry about Roger and Louis.

  Virginia is out of downers, so all that’s left to do is walk. She pulls on Cuthbert, her uniform pants, and a button-down shirt, places a liberator pistol in her pocket, and goes quietly down the stairs, out of the house, and toward the cliff overlooking the Pic du Lizieux. When she gets to the boulder where she sat with Bob after Roger’s capture, she climbs up on it, standing so she has the best view. She takes a deep breath, drawing in the pure air.

  “You look like the Statue of Liberty up there.”

  She spins around on the rock, drawing her pistol. Hemon stands below her, his cigarette glowing in the darkness.

  “You should be more careful,” she says. “That’s the second time I almost shot you.”

  “I can think of worse ways to die.”

  She grins at him while putting her gun back in its holster and motioning for him to join her on the rock.

  “Wild Bill and Vera told us about all you’ve done,” he says. “It would have been extraordinary for anyone—and I hope you don’t mind me saying this—but when you add the leg, it makes it all the more fantastic. Cuthbert, that’s what you call it, right?”

  “Yes. Cuthbert. Nobody ever gets that silly name right.”

  As the stars move across the sky, Virginia and Hemon talk about a thousand things and nothing at all. It’s easy being with him. She doesn’t mind that he brings up her leg, and she tells him the whole story. He tells her about his deep love for his parents and sister, and how he can’t wait to surprise them in Paris. When they try to figure out if they ever would have crossed paths while Virginia was a young university student, she’s surprised to learn he’s eight years younger than she is.

  “Well,” says Virginia. “We wouldn’t have run into each other at a Josephine Baker show, since you were only twelve when I was twenty.”

  “I saw Josephine Baker dozens of times,” he says. “Including when I was far too young for the burlesque. I even sent her a marriage proposal by mail.”

  Virginia smiles at him, remembering that night almost twenty years ago with her friend from her pension. He returns her smile, and stares at her a long time. She realizes their hands touch on the rock and looks down at where his rests on hers. When she returns her gaze to his, a lock of hair falls across her eyes. He reaches up to tuck it behind her ear.

  “What’s your real name?” he whispers.

  His lips are millimeters away from the side of her neck, but he doesn’t touch them to her skin. She can feel a buzzing between them, like an electrical current. She raises an eyebrow and shakes her head.

  “I’ll tell you mine,” he says. “It’s Paul Goillot.”

  “That suits you,” she says.

  “Thank you,” he says. “Now yours. I won’t tell a soul. I just want to know your name.”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to start knowing you. The you behind the legend. I know she’s in there.”

  “No,” she says with a smile. “Not until the liberation.”

  “We’re liberated!”

  “Not the rest of France.”

  “But I already know you intimately.”

  “Please,” she says, pulling away and climbing down from the rock. “A few days in a dusty barn hardly makes us intimate.”

  “No, I once came across a water nymph, swimming in a cove, and she almost made me lose my senses. Imagine when I found that nymph in the dusty barn.”

  She’s glad for the darkness of night so he can’t see her burning. She was right about someone watching her bathe, and that someone is sitting before her. Not only that, but he saw her completely naked—even without Cuthbert—and he didn’t run away screaming. In fact, he’s been running toward her ever since.

  He jumps down from the rock and places his hands on her waist, pulling her close to him. He leans in as if he’s going to kiss her, but again deflects up to whisper in her ear.

  “Tell me your name.”

  She takes his face in her hands and holds his stare as long as she can bear it. Then she puts her lips close to his ear, where she pauses one second—two, three—before whispering, “No.”

  Chapter 43

  It has become their game. He asks her name, she refuses. Even as they get down to business with the men, training them in weapons, packing trucks, ensuring they have enough arms, food, tents, and medical supplies to make a contained infantry unit, and waiting for the actual, final drop.

  Electrode was promised on September 8, but weather prevents the drop until the
eleventh. His arrival goes well and now that he’s here, he can take over wireless transmission for the region, freeing Virginia to leave. They’ve received approval to set out, heading north toward the Swiss border. If they find FFI groups along the way to join, they may do so, or they will rendezvous with the Allied command center at Bourg to decide their futures.

  Before the group leaves Chambon, many families join them in the good-byes. Le Corps Franc Diane is made of village boys, orphans, and Maquis, young men beloved by many. There are tears from parachute-blouse-wearing girls and admonitions from mothers—foster and real. There are baskets of food pressed into hands, puppies and children tumbling about, and prayers said over the convoy. One of the boys who has decided to stay in Chambon asks to snap a few pictures of the group, and Virginia agrees only if he promises to guard them with his life and never show another living soul. He takes a picture of her with the Jed team and Parachute the puppy. Then he asks for one more that he can join. Her Lost Boys line up on a porch, with her in the middle. They shout, “Le Corps Franc Diane,” before the photograph is snapped.

  Her emotions threatening to get the better of her, she issues a stern order for the boys to fall out. The sixteen of them climb into the two waiting lorries, and they wave good-bye until the last villager stops running.

  Then all Virginia can see are the walls of rock rising, and the forests growing, closing their protective curtains around the miraculous village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the place that helped bring her back to life.

  * * *

  —

  They’re quickly sobered by all they pass on the long journey.

  Rotting horse carcasses. Burned-out vehicles. Dead bodies. Shell-shocked refugees. Bombed towns. She can see in some of the boys of Chambon that they didn’t bargain for this. They were unprepared for how sheltered they were on the mountain.

  Now that it’s mid-September, the nights are becoming cold in the high elevations through which they travel. Lack of sleep and food rationing make the boys bicker. She finds herself feeling more the mother than ever. And yet . . .

  Paul.

  Is it wrong she thinks of him as his real name instead of his code name?

  Paul is always in the passenger seat when she drives. He’s first to catch the fish and fastest to kill and skin the rabbits that he somehow transforms into delicacies over the open flames of their campfires. Each night, he sleeps with his tent outside hers, guarding it. Each morning, the first thing she sees is his arm poking through the opening, holding out a tin of hot tea. All the time he whispers, “What’s your real name?” She continues to dodge the question.

  The boys adore him. At thirty years old, and with Simon gone, Paul is the new father figure of the group. He teaches the younger ones to fish. He shows them how to make a tent out of a parachute. He’s a patient instructor with shooting and weapons cleaning, and a tireless leader in physical exercises. He makes them talk about the bad things they see along the road, keeping them from pushing memories deep down to haunt them later.

  They find no groups to join, so they continue on to Bourg. Fifty kilometers outside the city, they pop a tire on a shred of metal. The sun setting, they decide to push the truck off the road for the night behind a pair of twisted iron gates hanging askew from an arched entranceway. After hiding the truck under cut branches, they drive the other truck slowly, while the overflow of boys follows on foot. At the top of the driveway they stare with open mouths at the magnificent fountain standing dry and crumbling before the abandoned château.

  The place has been decapitated, its highest turret shaved off by a bomb, the tower below black from having burned. But that’s only one side of the château. Though the windows are blown out—pigeons fluttering in and out of them—and vines choke its doors, the beauty of the manor is still apparent.

  The boys run toward the place as if it were an amusement park but are stopped by Virginia’s stern command. Paul and Raphael cock their machine guns and lead with Bob and Dédé as the boys fall into orderly, armed formation, checking each room on each floor methodically and thoroughly. Virginia is last, slowly walking in and looking at the high ceilings, running her hands over the moth-eaten tapestries, touching the keys of an out-of-tune piano, lifting corners of sheets draped over furniture now thick with rodent nests and bird droppings. Frescoes line a grand hall where Virginia can almost hear the tinny, music box sound of a waltz. The art contains gorgeous renderings of religious legends—slayed dragons, men in the bellies of whales, and Mary crushing the head of a serpent.

  “La Madone,” says Bob, ducking away before Virginia can slap him.

  A whoop from the staircase winding down to the cellar brings her back to the foyer, and in a few moments, Paul rises with his arms full of bottles.

  “Finally, I’m the answer to all you asked for,” he says. “A man who can shave, bearing fine French wine.”

  “I think she said a handsome, roguish man,” teases Edmund.

  “He’ll do,” Virginia says.

  * * *

  —

  They’ve made a blazing fire in the enormous hearth. Serge knows how to play the piano and bangs out song after out-of-tune song, while the boys sing, and smoke, and drink, and take turns dancing Virginia around the room. Each new set of hands that take her makes her long more for the strong hands of the man sitting next to Serge at the piano. Paul’s neck strains as he throws his head back and sings. He stops only to take swigs from the bottles being passed or to grin at her around the cigarette between his teeth.

  While she dances with Bob, then Dédé, then Edmund, then this boy and that boy, she turns her eyes continually to Paul, where he never takes his eyes from her but stubbornly refuses to dance. After hours, tired of waiting, she marches over to him and holds out her hands. He takes one and kisses it but remains seated.

  “Well?” she says.

  “I don’t dance,” he says, still holding her hand. He presses it to his pounding heart.

  “What, too macho?” she says. “You only hunt and fish and shoot guns?”

  “In part.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  He stands, moving her hand so it rests on his side, and leans to whisper in her ear.

  “I only dance with women whose names I know.”

  She narrows her eyes at him.

  “Then I guess you won’t be dancing with me,” she says.

  He doesn’t smile anymore. He looks at her like a wolf who wants to eat her, a look that makes her shiver. She takes her hand from his waist and turns her back on him, finding Bob, who’s all too happy to spin her around without knowing her true name.

  Soon, the boys begin to yawn. She tells them to drink the water in their canteens and corral their sleeping bags around the fireplace, and Paul says he’ll take first watch. The rest negotiate second and third watch. When they finally settle, she’s hit with a sudden melancholy that crashes over her like a wave.

  They’ll be at the Allied command center tomorrow and—though they haven’t discussed it—because they didn’t find any Maquis groups to join along the way, the boys will be folded into the French army. Paul and Raphael can join the Allies, but, as a woman, she cannot. The war will continue, and she might never see any of them again. She’s angry with herself for letting down her guard, for playing this game that can’t sustain itself.

  A little drunk and burdened by the knowledge of what the future holds, she leaves the room and starts for the staircase. She’ll seek out a room with a bed and maybe a pipe that will cough up some water with which to wash. When she reaches the top, she hears a voice.

  “Where are you going?” says Paul. “I can’t watch over you if you don’t stay with us.”

  I can’t watch over you.

  The words pierce her. How foolish she was to indulge in feelings of love during war. How foolish to allow the ice around her heart to thaw, leaving it v
ulnerable to injury.

  “I didn’t need watching the four years of this war prior to meeting you,” she says. “I don’t need it now.”

  She doesn’t wait for his reply, leaving him alone at the bottom of the stairs.

  Chapter 44

  The Allied command center bustles with activity. British, French, American, Canadian. Men darting to and fro, organizing and reorganizing, sending le Corps Franc Diane from one tent to the next. She can imagine what they think seeing her group: a hungover, ragtag band of boys with a limping woman, and two cheap vehicles—one with a spare tire the size of a bicycle wheel—that had seemed loaded with supplies in Chambon but now look like street peddlers’ wagons.

  We liberated the Haute-Loire, she wants to say. Do you understand how courageous these boys are?

  But there’s too much noise and motion, and the end comes much faster than she anticipated.

  While they take careful inventory of the weapons they must turn over, Raphael and Paul meet with French and American colonels. They return with sober faces.

  “The boys have two choices,” says Raphael. “One, go home to Chambon. For those of you seventeen and under, that’s your only choice.”

  “I thought seventeen-year-olds could join,” says a boy.

  “Only with parental consent.”

  The boy looks down at his boots.

  “There’s no shame in returning home,” says Raphael. “You can act as gendarme and continue protecting the village. And since the vehicles are from the region, they’ll even allow you to take them back.”

  Edmund and some of the boys from the village look at one another in silent consultation.

  “The other choice?” says Bob.

  “Enlist with the French Ninth Colonial Infantry Division, and join the fighting,” says Raphael. “For now, I’m going to work as a liaison for those who choose that route, reporting back to HQ through military communications.”