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

by Leslie Maitland

  Anti-Semitism in federal government offices even tarred the Jewish aid agencies themselves with suspicion of serving as secret tools for the Germans to maneuver Nazi agents onto American soil. But as the American Foreign Service Association later confirmed, “The official U.S. policy was that Jews were not to be granted American entry visas, as it would not be wise to upset any government that might become legitimate and important in Europe, and therefore a possibly valuable ally.” Consequently, between the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and war’s end in 1945, ninety percent of the visa quotas set aside for would-be immigrants to enter the United States from countries in Europe controlled by the Nazis went unfilled.

  In the days that she wasn’t traveling with Sigmar, Trudi was put to work helping Alice in the tedious task of ravitaillement or provisioning, which entailed standing on lines in the continual hunt for food. In the apartment, the absence of crumbs emboldened the mice to the point that they showed up at the table for regular meals with the entitlement of family members. When Sigmar brought home a cat to keep them at bay, the cat learned to filch as well as the mice, brazenly snatching food from Alice’s hands before she could get the plates to the table. When the cat made off with the delectable treat of a slice of liverwurst that Alice had waited all day in the cold to obtain, it sparked not only tears of vexation, but also a permanent longing for that kind of sausage that none in the family would ever outgrow. When Trudi managed to snare the prize of a single egg, all five of them selflessly argued so much about who should eat it that over the days they genteelly procrastinated about its consumption, the egg went bad, and they had to throw it away. They tried to brew coffee from roasted peas, learned to live on a diet of yellowish turnips called rutabagas, and relied for lunch on a carrot or an apple, saving for breakfast their single slice per person that was their daily ration of a dry mix of grains masquerading as bread.

  Janine (R) wears the Mulhouse insignia on her sweater as she poses with Trudi, Norbert, and the cat Munnele on the balcony of their Lyon apartment at 14, place Rambaud.

  But even here in the Unoccupied Zone, they were far from alone in their terrible hunger, with the Germans requisitioning the bulk of French food to ship over the border. Hunger became a paramount political issue. Across France housewives marched in food demonstrations, undermining the popularity of Marshal Pétain, the grandfather who purported to stand for traditional values yet failed to provide for the family’s supper. When stores lacked even what rations prescribed, starvation forced people to buy at inflated black market prices—as much as ten times higher than usual. Although this practice was technically outlawed, officials often had no choice but to close their eyes to it. Eventually, however, black marketeering offered the pretext for arresting those perceived as politically suspect, which proved useful in meeting Nazi quotas for both slave laborers and Jews to be deported east to feed the voracious fires of the camps.

  The slang term le système D, from the verb se débrouiller—to manage resourcefully to straighten things out—summed up the finagling required for survival. When the opportunity came to buy something scarce, people snapped at commodities they themselves did not need just to resell or trade them for other things that they wanted. When, for instance, Roland and Roger stumbled upon the chance to obtain a cache of silk stockings, they pooled resources in order to buy it and sold them off by the pair at a serious markup. From the Vichy government, both Roland and Roger received a small monthly “refugees’ stipend” by virtue of not being able to go home to Mulhouse. Still, with increasing bravado, Roger traveled to outlying agricultural regions and returned with sacks of food that brought hefty profits on the Lyon black market. The money he made, for example, when he managed to come by a large wheel of Gruyère that he sold by the wedge carried them both for a number of weeks. Roland pawned the gold Baume & Mercier wristwatch that had been his proud father’s baccalaureate present, then seized upon any petit métier or odd job he could find in order to claim it again. He sold chocolate truffles made by the cousin of a friend of a friend, and besides grading papers for Janine’s employer, he rewrote a thesis for a Chinese graduate student struggling to put his ideas into French. “Anyone can live well with money,” Roland would observe. “The art is in living well without money.”

  For those who suffered the barren routine of deprivation, however, it gradually spawned tension, envy, suspicion, and hatred. Consumers reviled as greedy and opportunistic the very suppliers on whom they depended. City dwellers accused the farmers of jacking up prices, farmers resented those in the city for hoarding resources, and everyone jealously eyed what others were getting. The wealthy who managed to acquire things beyond the reach of less fortunate neighbors were despised with more vitriol than even the Germans. They turned themselves into targets for denunciation based upon the clothing they wore, the magic deliveries that arrived at their doorsteps, and the smells that wafted from their apartments like a tantalizing essence of privilege.

  In June, with classes over, Roland opted for a simple life, after he and a tall and brawny Algerian Jewish friend encountered a woman selling a kayak. Though the price was steep for their means, the two young men impetuously bought it together and managed to get it to Saint-Germain-au-Mont-d’Or, a town on the Saône north of Lyon. From there they paddled to a small, uninhabited river island, pitched a tent, and decided to spend the month of July camping under the stars. They kept bicycles tied up on shore for trips to seek food, and they padded their diet with little fish they caught on a string, grilled in the open, and popped whole and crunchy into their mouths. While friends occasionally rowed out to visit the campsite where they presided like indigenous kings, they spent most of their time swimming, kayaking, lolling on the banks of the Saône, and baking themselves on their own island fiefdom. Janine was never able to get there, and she counted the days until his return, even as his eager departure delivered the message that, where she was concerned, a casual friendship suited his needs.

  In the weeks he was gone, Janine tried to forget him and went so far as to agree to be introduced to a young rabbi who, Mimi insisted to Sigmar and Alice, would represent an excellent match. Aiming to cut a dashing impression in equestrian garb of fitted jacket, jodhpurs, and boots, the rabbi called at the place Rambaud in order to meet Janine and her parents. Sigmar gaped, astounded, as the young man straddled his chair, having flipped it around so that the back of it rose between his splayed thighs like the head of a horse, and then held forth for over an hour.

  “So this is a rabbi?” Sigmar subsequently mused aloud, shaking his head as he summoned to mind the dignified Rabbi Zimels of Freiburg. He would have rejoiced to see his daughter marry a rabbi, but this one seemed a self-impressed fop, and Sigmar concurred with Janine’s decision not to invite his further attentions.

  At the end of July, Roland returned to Lyon slim and dark, his hair grown long and his skin kissed gold by the sun, even more impossibly handsome than Janine recalled. Basané—tanned by the sun. That was how his friend from the island described him, and that was how she would think of him always, his skin smooth and sleek and lacquered the golden color of honey. Captive to the physical longing his grace and beauty always aroused, she worshipped him like a primeval totem. She felt complete only when near him. Roland became her reason for being. Like many others of her generation, she was under the spell of a feminine model learned from her mother, a desire to serve and worship her man. And in her it was charged by the potent force of an aesthetic attraction that held her entranced.

  Once Roland was back in the city, Janine reverted to searching for him in the usual places—the cafés, the bookstores around the place Bellecour, the stalls that lined the quay of the Saône under the sheltering branches of chestnut trees, and along the stretch of the rue de la République where she knew he strolled in the late afternoons. She risked getting home late to linger in front of the Opéra, where he would have to pass by on the way to his building. But their impromptu talks, generally occurring in fr
ont of his friends, were rarely of any personal nature.

  Roger came home to their room one day that August to find Roland writhing in bed, wet with fever, near delirious, and groaning in pain. His pants gaped open, and his trembling fingers were clutching his abdomen, stiff and distended. His clothes and sheets were sodden with vomit. Roger ran for help, and when he returned hours later with a doctor in tow, Roland was unconscious. Emergency surgery confirmed the diagnosis of a ruptured appendix, with pus contaminating the abdominal cavity leading to virulent peritonitis. Even after the operation, there remained serious potential for developing sepsis, a bacterial infection polluting the blood, which often proved fatal.

  Each day, Janine rushed after work to Roland’s room in the Clinique Vendôme, though her parents believed she was spending time with Malou. At his bedside, she stroked his hot brow with cooling compresses, attempted to talk, held his hand, straightened his pillows, and fervently prayed for his recovery. She read to him without really knowing whether he heard her and tried to coax him back to life. She came prepared with political stories, news of the war, and gossip of friends. She watched him sleep, massaged his shoulders, and worried about the weight he was losing. Yet as he slowly roused to awareness, and the doctor said he should try to eat solid food, Janine despaired of her failure to find any dish tasty enough to entice him.

  “I can’t assure you he’s out of the woods,” Dr. Pesson conceded. “He’s an extremely sick young man, and it’s too soon to tell which way this will turn. But it would help if we could build his strength to fight the infection.”

  So began Janine’s career as a nurse, a role for which she had amply studied in Gray and which she would play long into the future. She quizzed the doctor and learned the importance of fluids to boost circulation; she searched the city for sources of glucose and paid for it out of her own meager salary. Miraculously, soon Roland appeared to rally a little, and her joy in her hospital visits gradually mounted, as they provided the chance to be at his side. For the first time, she knew every day where she could find him, and she made use of his weakness to anoint him with love and such tender attentions that the closeness she had strived to achieve since the day they first met now, at last, in intimate quiet started to flourish.

  Still, her happiness in his budding response and her understanding of how it had happened inexorably touched off moral self-doubt. Was she secretly pleased that this brush with death had so helplessly placed him into her care? In the disconnected hospital room, as removed from life as a prison cell, she had made herself essential to him. Guilt invaded her most precious moments: when he smiled at her with thanks in his eyes, kissed her fingers, or held her hand. When she wished they might stay, forever together, alone in that room. When she caught herself hoping he wouldn’t recover and leave her too quickly, before she had taught him to love her and want her. She agonized that God would punish her for it, that to teach her a lesson about discovering joy as a by-product of another’s pain, Roland would suffer a relapse, perhaps even die. But that horrible fear evolved, she saw, from an equally horrible, selfish conception. Why would God use Roland as an expendable tool for teaching her something? Was she that important?

  As Roland’s condition slowly improved and she saw him return her gestures of love, her fear dissipated. Still, five weeks passed after Roland’s emergency surgery before Dr. Pesson delivered a cheery prognosis with an avuncular clap on his young patient’s shoulder. “Well, my friend, you’re saved,” he announced. “Frankly, I thought you were finished. But it looks like you’re lucky—you’re going to make it.”

  Less apparent was how much he had changed, as the awareness of death lent him some of the wisdom of age. The life of casual friendships and carefree good times had lost its attractions. Beyond gratitude for Janine’s dedication to his recovery, in the closeness of hours they had shared Roland had surprised them both by falling in love. How could he help but respond to her kind ministrations? And if, when he saw her approaching, he sank a little lower in bed—wan, parched lipped, and slightly disheveled—who could blame him for not wanting to look too much better for fear that it might slacken her care?

  Over weeks of talks and peaceful silences alone with him in his room, she grew dearer to him than anyone else. Having come from a home where conversation generally meant bridging the gaps between courses at dinner, he luxuriated in hearing her stories and bathed in the calming alto tones of her voice. So she ransacked the suitcase of her experience for the most compelling memories to rouse him and nudge him back toward the land of the living, the place where he would love her robustly and never find cause to leave her again.

  When Roland was well enough to be released from the hospital, the doctor nonetheless advised a rest in the country. Not allowed: climbing four long flights to the room he shared with Roger. Reluctantly, Roland agreed to spend a month at the home of a family friend in the western suburb of Ecully, which left Janine distraught. Almost two years had passed since their first separation, in the panic-whipped days when war was declared, and that parting had stolen him from her. This time, when Roland left Lyon, thin and frail, Janine feared that the man who came back would again be the one who had readily left her before to spend a month self-sufficiently camped on an island—a man content to travel alone. A man she had already seen in her dreams: a man in a kayak, his skin shining gold in the light of the sun, paddling past her, waving to her as she stood by herself on the banks of a river.

  It was an image she carried back from her nights and tortured herself by bringing to mind, a vision of how she would lose him again. How helplessly she would watch him float by! She would cry to him over the rippling waters, but there were already so many cries in the world that hers would be lost and drown in the clamor, and she would watch him vanish into the distance.

  “J’attendrai,” she would whisper the words of her favorite song, whose lyrics comprised a promise to wait. With its echo of loss and unfulfilled longing, this tune would drift above the course of her years and battle forever the onrush of time that carried Roland farther and farther into the past. Even so, her love would remain perpetually with her, like a star whose glittering beam continues to journey into the present, long after the spark of its life is extinguished:

  J’attendrai, le jour et la nuit,

  J’attendrai toujours ton retour,

  J’attendrai …

  Le temps passe et court en battant tristement,

  dans mon coeur si lourd,

  Et pourtant, j’attendrai ton retour,

  et pourtant, j’attendrai ton retour,

  j’attendrai.

  I shall wait day and night,

  I shall always await your return,

  I shall wait …

  Time passes and runs and sadly beats

  in my too heavy heart,

  And yet I shall await your return,

  and yet I shall await your return,

  I shall wait.

  THIRTEEN

  A TIME OUT OF TIME

  WHEN ROLAND RETURNED TO LYON at the end of September, the greatest challenge was finding a place where he and Janine could be alone. On the single occasion he attempted to bring her up to his room, simply to sew a button onto his coat, his concierge indignantly ordered them back to the street. Yet appearing together in public was not without its hazards, as well. One afternoon, the young rabbi whose courtship she’d spurned spotted Janine walking arm in arm on the street with Roland, and he rushed to tell Mimi what he had witnessed. The picture the rabbi painted for her, the evident physical closeness in the way the young couple touched and talked and looked at each other, propelled the unhappy woman up the Presqu’île to report to her uncle. Wings of envy sped Mimi’s arrival, so that Sigmar and Alice had already heard an ample report of Janine’s unsanctioned romantic outing on the arm of a stranger even before she walked in the door. When Sigmar inquired where she had been, she pretended a crisis had detained her at work, a lie that enraged him. As punishment, he directed his eighte
en-year-old daughter straight to bed with orders not to place a foot on the floor for three days, except to go to the bathroom.

  Roland after his return to Lyon from recuperating in Ecully

  He relented the following evening, but only because an oil painting in a thick gilded frame, hanging directly over her bed, slipped from its nail. The noise brought him running to find that her head had crashed through the canvas, ripping a crater into the landscape. Still, he refused to meet Roland and forbade Janine to become involved with a non-Jewish man. It would only lead to heartbreak for he would never permit her to marry out of the faith, Sigmar warned. In any event, he added, she knew very well they soon would be leaving so that separation was inevitable.

  Unexpectedly, that last rationale helped to make her mother an ally. “Ach, puppy love,” Alice pronounced with a tolerant sigh. She agreed to meet Roland during one of her husband’s trips to Marseille, and impressed by his charming manners and respectful demeanor, she could not see the harm in allowing the pair to spend time together. In view of Sigmar’s plans to emigrate, the relationship, for better or worse, would necessarily end. Alice would not dare to challenge Sigmar about it, but she agreed to a mode of silent acceptance, as long as Janine was careful not to invite her father’s suspicion by coming home late or making a public display of herself.

  Janine was not permitted out in the evenings except for very special occasions when Alice helped to cover her absence because Roland had splurged on seats at the Opéra or tickets to hear a favorite performer. The couple grew misty together, holding hands through La Traviata, and sat transfixed before Charles Trenet, the jazzy, blue-eyed Fou Chantant or Jester of Song, who attained wild acclaim through the widespread demand for something uplifting. For the most part, however, Janine and Roland found their time with each other restricted to weekends and late afternoons, when they sometimes went to the movies on the rue de la République, always eager to catch a new film with Tino Rossi, the ebony-haired Corsican heartthrob who had popularized the song “J’attendrai” that they now adopted as theirs. Far more often, they walked and talked, followed their interests through secondhand bookstores, and watched daylight dwindle in their preferred cafés—le Royale or le Tonneau—contentedly sipping cups of Bovril. They were “dancing on the edge of a volcano,” as Roland put it to her, enjoying the moment, blinding themselves to the inevitable.