Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed

by Leslie Maitland

  Ambition was still not the thing that sparked Roland to action. Not the glitter of wealth, the rescue of country, the lust for battle, or the cause that captured his talents and time. The confusion of his national background—Italian, French, German, Alsatian—only fed his cynicism. He saw himself as less inclined to fight for ideals than to dwell in ideas, as an observer or critical thinker rather than as a reformer or soldier. Little use did he find for nationalism, militarism, or even patriotism that set populations to destroy one another, laying claim to individual freedom. Although reared as a Catholic, he distrusted the hold of religion that tended to choke the joy out of life through rigid, judgmental codes of behavior and the sting of guilt whipping the conscience. His convivial spirit favored inclusion, and—while Vichy fell in step with the Nazis and anti-Semitism crept into the open—he would notice only in retrospect that his own closest friends all had been Jews.

  Politically, Roland was decidedly liberal, and he reacted with disdain and revulsion to the rightist “rehabilitation” of France fustily championed by Marshal Pétain. That past November, when the marshal paraded through Lyon to rally morale and garner support, Roland had remained at home rather than witness the crowd’s adulation, but the city’s newspapers described it all. Four months after the German Army withdrew from Lyon, banner headlines attested to the public acclaim that served to create the aura and pretense, at least for a day, of a populace thrilled by the outcome of war that imposed defeat but avoided destruction.

  WITH ALL ITS SOUL LYON ACCLAIMS PÉTAIN, the front page of Le Nouveau Journal declared on that Tuesday, November 19. Pictures showed the old Verdun hero standing in uniform in the back of an open car with motorcycle escorts guarding his flanks, as he rode through the streets saluting the thousands who packed the sidewalks and fervently cheered all along the route of procession. People still smarting from France’s ignominious fall yearned to find the resolve of a leader—someone to blaze a trail to the future by restoring a version of France that was lost in the past—in a man over eighty who slept during meetings and was ready to do the enemy’s bidding.

  Roland tried to blot it all out. He rushed headlong and laughing toward what he enjoyed, rejecting Vichy’s dour nose-to-the-grindstone perspective in favor of his own manifesto. With everything in a state of upheaval, what sense did it make to worry or work or save for the future? With the country grappling with transition and loss, he would content himself with owning the present. On verra ça après la guerre—we’ll see about it after the war—was the motto Roland adopted. He quit his stifling notary job, started cutting law school lectures, and spent his days with like-minded students who directed their competitive zeal to winning at cards—belote and bridge the games they favored. After the armistice the previous June, when his paramour of six lively months returned to the arms of her husband home from the front, Roland plunged into bridge as a daily obsession. In that he excelled, his observant nature and analytical skills adding to his luck as a player. Freely he spent the money he had, particularly once his parents left him to live in Lyon alone.

  On n’est jamais aussi bien servi que par soi-même. His father’s old maxim provided a measure of justification: one is never as generously served as by oneself. But in his case, in serving himself, he also genially treated his friends. His own munificence tugged at his pockets and stretched them wider than they were deep, a condition that worried him not at all.

  As in Villefranche or Mulhouse before, but now on a far more glamorous scale, Roland found his way in the evenings to the route of Lyon’s informal parade. It progressed up and down the broad rue de la République, one of the main boulevards of the Presqu’île, the vital center strip of the city, whose name describes its formation as “almost an island.” It is a long, narrow, bustling peninsula between two rivers: the Saône to the west, the Rhône to the east, with twenty-eight bridges then spanning their waters. (The Germans would later bomb twenty-seven.) Streetcars ran on the rue de la République in both directions, their overhead cables tracing spidery webs against the sky. And just as Roland had determined in Mulhouse, with streetcars obscuring the view of the opposite sidewalk, it was essential to walk on the “right” side. After all, why waste one’s time on the trottoir des cocus and miss spotting the friends one most hoped to encounter? Here he instantly sensed that the west was the side where the young people walked, and among the throngs, Roland bumped into a fellow university student, Roger Dreyfus, whom he had known slightly in Mulhouse and latched on to now as the closest of friends.

  A thin young man of twenty-two with straight dark hair, jug ears, and angular features, Roger was not only Alsatian, but also, given his name, unmistakably Jewish. This was a fact that Roland never stopped to consider when they decided to live together and rented a room that suited their most dramatic sense of themselves. It was a small, bohemian bachelor pad at 27 rue Puits Gaillot, across from city hall and the Opéra, at the foot of the rue de la République. It meant four flights of stairs, sharing a bed, forgoing a kitchen, and making do with a bath in the hall, but from their garret window with a view of the Rhône, they were face-to-face with the eight white marble female figures in classical robes posed along the roof of the Opéra. In the morning when he opened his shutters and when evening came and he closed them again, Roland greeted the one on the corner, an encouraging muse with a lyre in her arm.

  Roger Dreyfus, Roland’s closest friend and roommate

  In the winter of 1941, a month or so after his move to the city, Roland was strolling on the rue de la République when, from a block away, he spotted Janine. He could tell who it was by the way she was standing: midi moins dix as she tilted a tiny bit to the left. Her sister, Trudi, was with her, and they had stopped to examine a window display, so despite his self-imposed interdiction on rushing and his reluctance to appear overeager, he quickened his pace to catch up with them.

  He was halfway there when Janine noticed him coming, a fantasy materializing out of her dreams—hatless, his overcoat billowing behind his long legs, a furled umbrella like a sword at his side. Everything and everyone else on the street turned blurry around him. There was only Roland, smiling now, raising his hand to catch her attention, a gesture confirming the reality of him. Silence descended—everything muffled but the crazy, dancing beat of her heart. In how many ways had she imagined this moment in the year and a half since they had parted, never knowing when, if ever, she might see him again? The force of her love for this beautiful man left her breathless. Even in the cold winter air, with nightfall approaching, her face felt hot, and she knew she was blushing. Her legs, rooted to the sidewalk, prevented her from running to him. How should she greet him? There was no way to guess what, if anything, she might mean to him now.

  She grabbed Trudi’s arm and spun her sister away from the window to look down the street. “Quick, quick!” she gasped. “Look who’s headed in our direction—it’s Roland! What should I say?” Before her sister could reply, he was standing before her, and Janine could not contain a radiant smile. “Roland!” she cried. It was the only word that came to her and the only thought that mattered now.

  “Eh, voilà! Can it be true? The famous Günzburger sisters!” he greeted them jovially. “This is incredible! I never expected to run into you here! How long have you charming ladies been in Lyon? Have you really been here all of this time since leaving me behind in Mulhouse to fend off the Boches by myself?”

  Uncertainly, Janine extended her hand, but Roland ignored it. He took hold of her arms and floated a gentle kiss past each cheek, more brotherly than she would have preferred. He brought a light, mocking air of ceremony to this unplanned reunion, lifting the weight of significance from it. Then he turned to Trudi and gave her the same, the grin and the kisses that promised nothing and yet had the power to evoke the unspeakable picture of his being involved with some other girl.

  Janine felt unprepared and scrutinized. She regretted not having had time at least to fix her hair and lipstick before he saw her
looking so rumpled. She could barely remember what she was wearing and felt herself shrinking, having imagined so many more private, perfect, romantic encounters than this accidental public meeting. So blandly polite and casually pleasant, equally pleasant to her and to Trudi. She struggled to find her voice, simultaneously self-conscious and ready to launch herself into his arms.

  “What, have we been here all this time?” She repeated his question as if in a trance. “No, no, until mid-November we were in Gray, a little town on the Saône. But there’s nothing there, no reason you’d know it.” She fell silent, afraid to seem nosy, yet she needed to know where he had been for more than a year, while her most desperate desire had only been for a letter from him. “But what about you? I’d heard your family had gone to Villefranche, but there are so many, I couldn’t imagine which one you’d gone to. I only hoped you weren’t called up to the army.…”

  Roland threw back his head and laughed. “Which Villefranche? Are there really that many? I spent almost all the time not far from here in Villefranche-sur-Saône. If only you’d dropped a note in a bottle, it could have floated straight downstream to me! Or you yourself might have taken a swim and come for a visit! Now, that would have been a friendly gesture in these miserable times.”

  “Oh, if only I’d known—I would have liked to.” The words tumbled out, sounding plaintive and needy to her, but he just laughed again.

  “Oui, I do seem to recall that in Mulhouse you enjoyed an occasional dip in the river,” he teased.

  She was mortified, sorry to have made it so clear how much she had missed him. She thought she might cry and looked at the ground, but seeing her redden, Roland rescued her feelings with a straightforward question.

  “So where are you living? Are your parents and brother here with you also?” he asked, and then cut her off, interrupting her answer. “No, wait—we can’t stand here like this on the street. This really calls for some celebration.” He stepped between the two sisters, linking arms with a girl on each side, nodded his head toward a little café, and drew them along. “I insist,” he said. “You must have time for a coffee with an old friend, or something that passes for ersatz coffee these days.”

  In the event, they had to settle for cups of Bovril, the beef paste tea that was becoming a staple, with everything else so meagerly rationed. It had the limited virtue of being warm. And with Roland’s legs bent under the table next to her own, Janine felt certain that champagne at Versailles could not have been more golden or festive. Prolonging the moment, she sipped it slowly while studying him: the slim wrist and fingers holding his cup; the square jaw, an imperturbable stiff upper lip, yet a sensual mouth; his inquisitive brows framing dark, gentle eyes; the thick chestnut hair of his Italian grandfather. When he pulled off his muffler and carelessly dropped it onto his lap, she noticed that he had gotten so thin she could see his Adam’s apple rise and fall above his shirt collar each time he swallowed. It made him look young and vulnerable, and Janine wondered if he was eating enough. She felt drugged by the overpowering, delicious nearness of him.

  “Now, I want to hear everything,” he said, tipping back in his chair. He blinked his eyes tightly shut for a second—a habit, she’d noticed—as if he could bring the world into more sensible focus when he decided to look around again. With his eyes closed, she freely admired the face she had missed. “How did you happen to come here?” he asked, his eyes without warning again meeting hers. “Why Lyon? Where are you living? You still haven’t told me.”

  Together, Janine and Trudi told him about their sojourn in Gray, about their father’s awful detention in a dungeon in Langres, and about their frenzied flight to Vichy with Alice and their Aunt Marie courtesy of the French Army when the Germans attacked. Though they luckily found Father back in Gray after the armistice, it was too dangerous to stay there with the Nazis in charge, and so with Marie’s daughter living in Lyon, this was a natural move. Not easy, though, to obtain transit papers! Of course they felt very much safer in the Unoccupied Zone, and the parents appreciated that their cousin Mimi’s husband had proved exceedingly helpful in getting them settled.

  As she chronicled all that had happened since their last parting, Janine realized that nervousness was making her babble. But still she went on—the most amazing news not yet recounted. Norbert had enlisted in the Foreign Legion the previous winter and shipped out to Morocco. For a year they had been worried sick about him—no news at all. Then, hard to believe, not one week after arriving in Lyon, Alice ran into him on the rue de la République, where he was sitting and shining shoes. “Un vrai miracle!” Janine exclaimed delightedly. With France out of the war, the Legion had released him into the Unoccupied Zone. Better to come to the cousins in Lyon, Norbert had figured, rather than make his way back to Gray and meet up with the Germans. Mimi was bound to be in touch with Marie and could tell him where and how the family was.

  “Mother threw her arms around him and wept for joy,” Janine continued. “But you can guess how she felt to find her darling son in such a condition. Norbert told us that right on the spot, Mother started to scold him: ‘Norbert! What on earth are you doing? Now you live like a beggar and shine shoes in the streets? Why didn’t you go straight to Mimi when you arrived here? She could have helped you.’ ”

  At this point in her story, Janine regretted providing so much detail. It would feel shameful and disloyal to the family to tell Roland what her parents had been aggrieved to learn: that Norbert had, in fact, gone directly to Mimi when he arrived in Lyon, but she had done no more than lend him a few francs and point him to the shelter for refugees where he was living when Alice discovered him homeless and hustling for money. Quickly, Janine changed the subject.

  Mimi’s husband, Maurice, had rented them a wonderful apartment on the place Gabriel Rambaud, just a block off the Saône. “Number 14,” she pointedly dropped the address, hoping Roland might remember it. It was on the fifth floor of a corner building with a wraparound terrace and very much nicer than they had expected. The flat was spacious and had glass doors looking onto the terrace, offering a clear view of the turrets of Fourvière, the basilica perched across the Saône on a hilltop above the city. She decided not to mention that given the shortage of fuel, glass walls meant their rooms were dreadfully cold. Nor did she let on that lacking a bath or shower, they had to pay to bathe at the Hôtel Claridge, where she and Trudi economized by sharing a weekly tub.

  “But what about you?” Janine asked him, finally embarrassed by the uninterrupted sound of her own voice. “Where are you living? Is your family here with you, too, or are they still in Villefranche?”

  “No, I’m all alone and, like Norbert, sadly in need of a little mothering myself,” he offered with an exaggerated frown, prompting her to blush again. In a feeble effort to appear more chic, she had pushed up the sleeves of her woolen sweater, and her bare forearm felt tantalizingly close to Roland’s hand on the table. How she yearned for his touch or to clasp his hand in her own. “My family went back to Mulhouse at Christmas,” he said, “and by now I’ll bet they’re all forced to speak German. By the way, Hannele,” he recalled her Germanic nickname with a mischievous grin, “I really must commend how much your French has improved. You’ve learned a lot since the last time I saw you.” He tipped his head in admiration, but then another wicked smile crept to his lips. “Those boys in Gray must be good teachers.” He turned and patted her hand in approval—paternalistic and condescending, not the touch she’d longed for throughout the months she had dreamed only of him.

  “Speaking of family, I think it’s time we headed home,” Trudi interjected with a meaningful glance. “The parents will be anxious and waiting for dinner.”

  Roland checked his watch. “Ah, I had no idea it had gotten this late! How selfish of me to have kept you so long!” He turned around, raising a finger to summon the waiter, and then stood to help them on with their coats. Janine averted her head to hide the tears that sprang to her eyes and wondered how to contro
l her expression, as once again the man she loved disappeared. Her cup of Bovril was already empty, yet pretending to find one more sip still at the bottom, she hid her face behind the rim in order to gain a moment to compose herself. Retrieving his umbrella from behind his chair, Roland moved aside, allowing the sisters to exit before him. As they filed out the door, Janine furtively dabbed at her eyes and tried to put on a mask of acceptance.

  “It’s been wonderful to see you,” she said on the sidewalk, forcing a smile and extending her hand.

  He arched his brows in a look of surprise. “Si vite que ça?” So you’re that eager to get rid of me now? “I was about to suggest a pleasant café on the rue des Cordeliers where we could all meet again tomorrow afternoon.” He tucked his muffler into his coat and paused to look up the street toward city hall. “By the way,” he added, “did either of you happen to know Roger Dreyfus in Mulhouse?” He didn’t bother to wait for an answer. “Roger and I are rooming together, and if he’s free, I’ll bring him along. I’m sure you’ll both like him. A demain. I hope you can make it. Say five o’clock.” He gave them the address, lightly kissed them again on both cheeks, turned, and was gone.

  Without Trudi as witness, by the time they got home, Janine would have suspected herself of inventing it all, even as for the rest of the night she critically picked over every single word she had said. Why, if really compelled to prattle along in a breathless barrage, had she failed to mention the things that might have helped her win his respect? That might even have made him a little bit jealous? How she tricked the Kommandant into signing their papers! How the soldier from Freiburg, stationed in Gray, courted disaster in wanting to save her and make her his wife! How André Fick, in love with her also, endangered his own life to help her family cross over the line! Those were the stories she should have related, that might have actually piqued his interest in her, casting her in a more glamorous light. She should have, she could have, and surely she would have, given more time; and still she berated herself for nattering at him.