by Jan Rehner
Marius was right. Sabine noted pairs of German soldiers patrolling the square, and a dozen more lounging at the base of the statue of the Three Graces, the city’s emblem. Beauty, Charm, and Grace. It seemed that even these goddesses had been conquered, and taken their virtues elsewhere.
“The only thing worth drinking here is pastis,” Marius warned, ordering two glasses.
The drinks came with a small carafe of water. Marius added a drop of water to the clear pastis and watched it turn milky, before downing it in one long swallow. “Any news, Sabine?”
It took some time for her to answer. Gazing at her, Marius could see how loss could suck the air of sound and block the throat. When she finally did speak, he had to lean in to hear her words. “The women and children were sent to Auschwitz. Miron, Théo and Arnold, I’m not sure, maybe Estonia.”
“Léon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Thank God you weren’t there.”
Sabine looked up sharply. “I’m more sorry about that than I can say.”
“That’s foolishness. You know it’s not your fault. Look around you,” he said, nodding in the direction of the soldiers. “Where in this world would those innocents have been completely safe? You did everything you could.”
Sabine nodded, and Marius could tell she’d heard all of this before and it was useless to her. He wanted to say that children were resilient, that perhaps they’d survive, that maybe she would find them and her husband again, but it seemed like tempting fate to speak the words, and fate had been so unkind and blind. He remembered how quick-thinking she’d been at the camps, how she had tricked the guards and smuggled out children under their noses. Now he had to call on that spirit again. “Right now we have work to do. Are you ready for this, Sabine?”
She raised her chin. “I am.”
“There’s a small boarding house just across the square, Rue de la Carbonnerie. It’s run by Madame Damas. She’s expecting you. She won’t ask any questions. In your room, you’ll find a Red Cross uniform and a map to the prison. When a food parcel arrives, Madame Damas will let you know. Take it to the prison the same day. When you have something for me, come to this café and I’ll find you. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“It’s good to be working together again. Just one more thing. Don’t be alarmed by Madame Damas. She has the face of a turnip and the temper of a Doberman, but she’s on our side.” He winked and squeezed her hand, and then he was gone.
A few hours later, Sabine faced another sleepless night in another spartan room, floorboards creaking as she paced. She had everything she needed, and nothing she wanted. When she could stand no longer, she lay down on the bed and studied the face of the young Miron, so confident, so sure of the future, so sure there would be a future. She placed the photo face down on her chest. Maybe his face would melt into her skin and she would breathe in and out with him again in perfect concert.
“Come back,” she whispered into the night. “Come back.”
The prison was in the southwest section of Montpellier, an old Ursuline convent. According to Madame Damas, the convent was used as a prison as far back as the French Revolution. In the nineteenth century, it housed military barracks and then reverted to a prison for women. It was the presence of the Gestapo now that made the building its most unholy.
Twelve stone steps, Sabine counted, led up to the circular front of the building. Beside the huge wooden front door, there was a bell to pull. Sabine braced herself to face the dreaded black uniform of the Gestapo, but it was a woman in the uniform of the Milice who opened the door.
Minions. Errand boys for the Germans, Sabine thought, but she’d been naïve enough to believe that women had better sense than to join the Milice. Apparently not.
She forced a smile and held out her pass. “I’ve brought a food parcel for the prisoners.”
The woman merely jerked her head as a greeting, and Sabine entered the rotunda. The space was enormous, with high ceilings and a row of windows that looked out into a large courtyard completely enclosed by block buildings, two along the side and one across the back. A series of graceful archways were all that was left of what was once a convent.
Sabine followed her guide to a small office at the shadowy edge of the rotunda, only to face another woman in a Milice uniform, only this one had a tongue. “Open the parcel. Here on the desk,” she ordered.
Sabine undid the string holding the parcel together, and waited while the woman pawed through its contents.
“Onions, potatoes, bread, carrots, and an old black overcoat,” she intoned. “Hardly seems worth the effort.”
“We do what we can,” Sabine replied, as pleasantly as she could, all the time wondering if there was a message in this sorry lot. She didn’t know where it might be hidden and hoped the woman didn’t either. It might be sewn into the lining of the coat, or baked into the centre of the bread, or maybe even part of the onion skin.
The woman waved her hand, apparently uninspired to look further. “You can go.”
Sabine was relieved and dismayed at the same time. She’d hardly been inside for more than ten minutes. She’d seen very little.
On the way back through the rotunda, Sabine stopped at one of the square windows overlooking the courtyard.
“Imagine what this must have looked like when the nuns lived here,” she said. “Do you think there was once a fountain?”
The guide came to stand by Sabine at the window. “There are no nuns here, more’s the pity. The prisoners could use their prayers.”
Sabine couldn’t hide her surprise. She’d believed that anyone who joined the Milice was incapable of compassion. She looked beyond the uniform for the first time and saw a young woman with red hair and hazel eyes. She had a fierce little face, not pretty, but animated.
“How many prisoners are here?” she risked asking.
“About eighteen in those blocks. But there’s a cellar underneath us, and torture chambers. The Gestapo call them interrogation rooms.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. I’m not allowed down there.”
“Can you get me down there, as a nurse?”
“I’ll try. Now you better go.”
Sabine made six more visits to the prison, each time adding to her drawings when she returned to her room. Her art training ensured she was precise about dimensions. In fact, her drawings resembled architectural plans. She had the main buildings sketched out, as well as all the windows and visible doorways. She didn’t always see the red-haired woman, but when she did she learned where the cellar door was and how many soldiers were usually present during the day. The Gestapo officers, she was told, only came at night.
On the seventh visit, the red-haired woman pressed a key to the cellar door into her hand. “Be quick,” she urged. “I couldn’t get permission. This is the best I could do.”
Sabine acted instinctively. She had no logical reason to trust the red-haired woman, but she did. She entered the cellar, counting steps all the way.
It was not as she imagined it would be. There were no carnivorous rats scuttling across the floor, no flowers of mould blooming across damp walls, no menacing shadows. The space was bright with bare light bulbs hung at intervals overhead. They seemed to be permanently on. Exposed pipes ran along the ceiling, and there was the intermittent sound of water flowing, and the whirring vibration of an engine or a machine, maybe some sort of generator or power source.
There were six cells here, more like cages because their barred tops did not reach the ceiling. Four of them were occupied by shapes slumped on narrow beds. Sabine went from cell to cell, appalled. She saw their swollen faces, black bruises, crooked limbs, bleeding hands. Worse, she saw their eyes, glazed over or desperate, or, once, a flicker of hope. She couldn’t help them. She had no keys to the individual doors.
“Who
are you?” she whispered to the single man who sat up.
“Doesn’t matter,” he croaked. “But get her out.” He pointed in the direction of the next cell.
Sabine looked in but the figure she saw didn’t move. As she was turning away, she suddenly froze, her eyes riveted on a piece of white cotton from a girl’s slip caught in the door. It fluttered there for a second like a wounded dove, and then hung limply.
“Who is she?” she asked the other prisoner.
“Monique.”
“I’ll do my best,” Sabine promised, quickly retracing her steps.
The red-haired woman met her at the top of the stairs, grabbing for the key, closing the cellar door and locking it. “Get out of here,” she hissed.
Sabine wanted to run, but she forced herself to walk all the way back to Madame Damas’ boarding house. She locked herself in her room and worked on her drawings for another hour. Then she changed out of her Red Cross uniform, put on her summer dress, and went to the café to wait for Marius to find her.
She had already ordered a second pastis, and was sure one of the patrolling soldiers was regarding her suspiciously, before Marius finally arrived. She had an urge to blurt out everything she’d learned, but a look of caution in her friend’s eyes stilled her tongue.
“Come,” he said. “Let’s take a stroll. We shouldn’t linger here.”
So they walked calmly and innocently through the square in the opposite direction from Sabine’s room and talked of nothing more unsettling than the possibility of rain, or the fine dust blown in from the sea winds that drifted across their skin, while Sabine kept seeing a scrap of cloth trapped in a cage door and the shape of a girl who couldn’t move.
They walked all the way to the botanical gardens and found a bench, as if the lush foliage surrounding them would absorb their secrets in the same way it drank in the sunlight and the rain.
“The drawings are done,” Sabine began. “I’ve been down to the cellar, but only once. There are four prisoners there. One of the men, he didn’t give his name, says there’s a young woman there, Monique. He asked me to get her out.”
“Monique is there?”
The name had meant nothing to Sabine, but it seemed to galvanize Marius. “Tell me everything.”
In precise detail, she described the steps, the windows, the office, the doorways, the eerily bright cellar, the cages, the handful of soldiers in the courtyard, the Gestapo that only came by night like vampires, and the red-haired woman who’d helped her. She talked until her mouth was dry, as if words were magic spells that could open cage doors.
When she was finished, the two friends sat in silence, listening to the rustling of leaves. Then Marius reached out and took her hand. It seemed almost small in his. They smiled at each other, two souls linked together by conspiracy and danger.
“You’ve done good work. Don’t go back to the prison. You’ll be leaving Montpellier tomorrow morning. Dorine will meet you at eight at the train station. Just leave the drawings wrapped up in the Red Cross uniform in your room.”
“But Marius—”
“Jean, remember? Goodbye old friend.”
He turned away and Sabine watched his large figure gradually grow smaller until it disappeared. So her part was done, that much was clear. She felt frustrated and restless, dismissed and bristling with questions she couldn’t ask. Drawings of a prison? She knew what they were for, and now she was to be shut out of the action. But she wanted to act and instead she was being sent away like a schoolgirl who couldn’t handle anything more serious than a pencil.
The light was beginning to fade. She had to walk all the way back to her room. Her body began to move, but her mind was stuck on her disappointment. Why didn’t they trust her? Why didn’t they let her do more?
She wasn’t paying attention. She almost collided with a soldier as she re-entered the square. “Watch where you’re going,” he snarled.
His voice catapulted her back to her senses.
“Papers,” he snapped.
While she was fumbling for them, another soldier approached.
“I saw her earlier sitting in one of the cafés. She seemed to be waiting for someone, a man. And then the two of them left the square.”
It was the same soldier she’d noticed while waiting for Marius. He spoke in German, but she followed the gist of his words.
“Take her in for questioning,” the first soldier ordered.
It happened so swiftly. One moment of carelessness. One moment of thinking only of herself. Perhaps this was exactly what Dorine had tried to warn her about. Maybe she was as naïve as a schoolgirl, after all.
The drawings were the key to everything. She’d been trusted with the most important task of all, and the Germans must never find out.
Now her mind was fully alert, vibrating like a delicate instrument. The soldier was gripping her arm, but she felt nothing. The cafés, the storefronts, the statue of the Three Graces, the people, the square itself—everything seemed to fade away as she tried to keep in step.
The soldier took her to some kind of administrative building, probably attached to the functioning of the now defunct Hôtel de Ville. They entered the nearest office, where Sabine was pushed into a chair.
“Wait here,” the soldier ordered.
Sabine leaned her head on the desk a moment, and then sat up straight. This was a proper desk, she thought, with papers strewn across it and a telephone. Someone worked here. Surely the questions wouldn’t be too serious. The soldier didn’t think she was actually a threat. That notion gave her courage.
Within minutes, the soldier returned with another man in uniform. Again, they talked to each other in German.
“She was in a café, acting suspiciously. Waiting for a man. When he came they left together.”
“Who was the man you met?” the second soldier inquired in French.
“It’s not against the law to meet a man, is it?”
Wrong answer.
The fist smashing into her mouth stunned her.
Pain lit up the inside of her head. Stars blazed behind her eyelids. She felt a dam burst in her mouth, and she coughed out a spray of blood, blotches of red all over the desk and the papers.
She braced herself for another blow, but what she heard was another voice speaking German, a third man and a very angry one.
“What the fuck? Look at this mess. If you want to question her, take her to the cells. Get this cleaned up. Immediately.”
Someone hurriedly thrust a handkerchief at her. She grabbed at it and covered her mouth.
She looked up. The two soldiers were standing with their backs to her, leaning over the desk, intent on wiping up the blood and salvaging the papers.
She had only seconds. She stood up quietly. She backed towards the open door and slipped through into the hallway.
It was only a dozen steps to the entry door.
She covered the lower part of her nose and mouth with the handkerchief and opened the door.
A soldier outside held up his hand for her to stop.
“Please,” she said in German. “I came here voluntarily as a witness, but I’m so nervous, my nose began to bleed. If I could just clean myself up.” She nodded in the direction of the nearest café.
She waited, her face calm, though her heart was thudding.
The soldier stared at her.
Seconds passed, agonizingly slow.
“All right. Come right back.”
Sabine nodded and lowered her head. She marched straight to the café, feeling the soldier’s eyes on her back. Once inside, she found the washroom, spit out blood and bits of teeth, and washed her face. She turned her dress inside out to hide the stains and found a kerchief in her purse to cover her hair. Then she walked straight out the back door and disappeared.
Somewhere along the train ride
back to Paris, at a lonely country station, Dorine disembarked briefly and talked to a man wearing a fedora. Sabine watched them from the window and thought she caught something wistful in their parting. Perhaps because of Marie-Antoinette, she was attuned to women who fell into hopeless love.
When Dorine returned, she seemed to need several minutes to find the right words to tell Sabine what she’d learned.
“The St. Ursula prison was raided this morning at ten o’clock. A man wearing a Red Cross uniform rushed the door when it was opened to him, followed by half a dozen others. Three of the prisoners in the cellar, including Monique, were rescued. A fourth died. Both the Milice women were killed.”
Sabine had nothing to say. She turned her head away and gazed at the landscape. War was never straightforward. She’d helped one woman, only to betray another.
June 6, 1944. Dorine burst through the door of the apartment, her face lit up with excitement. “The invasion, Jeanne. It’s finally begun.”
Sabine was in the tiny kitchen making ersatz coffee to go with a breakfast of black bread. The cup she was holding crashed to the floor. As she knelt to pick up the pieces, her tears began to flow.
The two women were now living in Dorine’s fourth floor apartment overlooking the main street of the Île St. Louis. Sabine was grateful, both for a room of her own and for Dorine’s company, which smoothed out the sharp edges of her loneliness. She still did not sleep for more than a few hours, but when she did her nights were dreamless because her days were crowded with the effort required to navigate a city under occupation.
Paris was practically without gas or electricity. Fuel was mostly newspapers screwed into tight balls and sprinkled with a little water to make them burn longer. The joke was to use pages from the collaborationist Paris-Soir, which was already filled with hot air. The métro closed from eleven to three on workdays and shut down all weekend. Curfew was at midnight. Skirts that June were short—to save material. Food was scarce and rationing was stringent. Women stood in long, dreary queues for two eggs and two ounces of margarine. The hungrier people became the more willing they were to pedal their bicycles for miles into the countryside to find a farmer equally willing to sell a chicken or a handful of vegetables for an exorbitant price.