by Jan Rehner
Dorine knelt down beside Sabine. “Why are you crying? I’m sensing these aren’t tears of joy.”
Sabine shook her head. Whenever she tried to talk about her past her throat closed up. For months and months, when she was at the House of Izieu, the invasion was a fairy tale they told the children at night, the magical turn in the tale that would lead to the happy ending of the war. Now it was real, and two months too late.
“You know,” Dorine continued. “The best way to deal with misfortune is to talk. I’m here. I’m pretty low risk.”
“Misfortune? That sounds like a temporary setback or at worst a broken leg. There’s no vocabulary for what happened to us.”
“Well then, give me whatever words you have left. And can we please get up from the floor?”
They made their way to the living room, and Dorine opened the windows wide and let the summer light shine in.
She sat in a chair across from Sabine. “To begin, I think you should know that my name is Denise Mantoux. I come from Aix-en-Provence. My husband is a prisoner of war and I haven’t heard from him in months. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, and in the meantime, I’ve fallen in love with someone else.”
“The man in the fedora at the train station.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. But I’m a good Catholic and I’ll keep my vows until I know if my husband still exists. Now you.”
“My name is Sabine Zlatin.”
She couldn’t go on. She heard a crack like thunder, but that couldn’t be right because the sun was so bright. The sound was coming from inside her body. She remained silent. She stared at Dorine, now Denise. The light streaming into the room from the windows behind Denise’s chair turned her hair into a wispy halo and dimmed her face.
“Start with the words you remember,” Denise urged. She braced herself for she knew the words would be awful.
Finally, Sabine spoke. Her voice had a wavering underwater quality and it was difficult to decipher the sounds she was making as words.
“Sorrow, husband, children, Auschwitz.”
Time ceased. A bicycle bell rang from the street far below them. A conversation drifted in through the window. Leaves rustled. The world outside had not vanished.
“Are they dead?” Denise managed to ask.
When Sabine opened her eyes, she saw that the slant of the light had shifted and faded. She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting or how long Denise had been waiting for her answer.
“I don’t know,” she finally said.
“What do you know, for certain?”
“I know numbers. Forty-four children, convoy numbers seventy-one, seventy-three, and seventy-four.”
She heard Denise gasp and felt Denise’s arms wrap around her, and then the names came tumbling out: Miron and Léa, Théo, Coco, Nina, Sami, Hans and Max, and on and on into the night she emptied out the House of Izieu until all the people who had helped her there stood beside her in the room and all the tears she had were set loose to glisten in the moonlight.
Denise put her to bed and kissed her on the forehead.
That night she dreamed she was there again helping Philippe and Marie make sandwiches in the kitchen, watching Rénate and Liane pick apples, fluffing a child’s pillow, and waving at Miron as he stood at the river’s edge—all the small, banal, and utterly beautiful moments that had once made up her daily and blessed life.
When she opened her eyes sometime the next day, sorrow still clung to her, but she had slept for fourteen hours and the dream had soaked into her blood, giving her strength.
As the summer stretched into July and then August, the initial euphoria of the invasion faded. Smug smiles appeared when the Germans erected a signpost pointing to the Normandy front, but sour doubts also arose. The Allied army was a silently approaching thing, like a hurricane spiralling toward the city. It might hit with full fury, or track a different course and miss Paris altogether.
The days of queuing and the nights of darkness went on and on with metronomic regularity. But beneath this placid façade, the men who controlled the Resistance networks in Paris were quietly seething, locked in a political battle of their own.
Sabine was puzzled. “Aren’t we all on the same side?” she asked Denise.
“Yes and no. Everyone wants the Germans out, but who steps into their absence is the point of disagreement. The Gaullists or the Communists?”
“Really? Four years of occupation and men are still obsessed with power? Haven’t they learned anything?”
“Apparently not.”
“How do you know this, anyway? Surely most people believe the Resistance is a united front.”
“Yes, unless you work with one group or another.”
“Which group did I work for? No,” Sabine raised her hand. “Don’t tell me. I don’t even want to know. And the man in the fedora?”
“He’s with the FFI, the French Fighters of the Interior, the Gaullists.”
“I see,” Sabine said, but she didn’t really see. It all seemed crazy to her, this unending struggle for control and domination. It always ended with someone’s dreams in shreds, or a fist in the face of the powerless.
She grabbed her shopping bag and set off for another day of lining up for food, but her steps slowed as she reached Notre-Dame. There were many beautiful churches in Paris, but none like this, an eight-hundred-year-old monument to a time when people believed the world was held in something grander than mere human hands. Sabine thought about the centuries of asking in all the churches of Paris for some meaning to reveal itself, and all the centuries that had passed in utter silence, and she was convinced that people were no further advanced than tiny birds flinging themselves from their nests into the air in the naïve expectation of flight.
Two weeks later, early on a Saturday morning still rosy from dawn, Sabine was once again in the square in front of Notre-Dame with Denise, when she saw something astonishing that filled her simultaneously with hope and dread.
Hundreds of men were moving across the square toward the gates of the walled Préfecture of Police only two hundred metres from the church. Bearded and clean-shaven, in shirtsleeves or suits, in berets or fedoras or bareheaded, carrying pistols or rifles or hand grenades or nothing at all, they advanced as one. A priest, his bible in hand, emerged from the Sainte Anne gate of the cathedral and joined the flow of men.
Sabine and Denise couldn’t move or speak.
Several minutes later, above the grim and grey roof of the main block of the Préfecture, they saw the French tricolour flapping in the breeze, a singular flag of defiance against a sky of Nazi swastikas.
With or without the Allies, the liberation of Paris had begun.
The next five days were disjointed and chaotic. Nothing was clear. Reports contradicted each other. Spurts of gunfire split the air in isolated pockets all across the city. The cafés were filled with cigarette smoke, tipped over chairs, and shouting. Maybe someone, somewhere was watching a desperate plan unfold, but Sabine lived those days caught up in a bewildering series of events.
No one trusted anything in the newspapers. Instead they read the messages scrawled on walls: Aux Barricades! People used whatever was at hand to build barricades on the streets. They pried up paving stones and piled up bedsteads, sandbags, chairs, and subway grills. An antique dealer raided his stock and heaped Louis XVI dining tables and chairs onto the barricade in front of his store, topping it off with a chandelier. On another corner, four men hauled a pissotière onto their pile of rubble. Paris had gone back two centuries in a matter of days.
Sabine was unprepared for the noise. After four years of tongue-biting and mute submission, the city was a cacophony of sirens and gunshots, guttural cries and the grinding advance of German tanks. Her ears rang with the whirring of bicycle wheels, running footsteps, and the whooshing sound of Molotov cocktails looping through the a
ir and exploding into yellow flames as they hit their targets.
Her eyes swam with a series of bizarre and surreal images. A bride and groom stood in front of a barricaded mairie in the fourth arrondissement, waiting for an official who never came to marry them. Shards of glass glinted in the sun. Char marks stained the pale stone of shops, their awnings blackened and ripped. A woman in an elegant dress wore a Croix de Lorraine armband and the helmet of a fallen German soldier as she stationed herself at the top of a barricade. The Grand Palais, housing a visiting circus, exploded into a mass of flames. The circus horses stampeded. A tiger raced through the streets of Paris, a brief flash of striped beauty, before bullets felled it and a band of hungry Parisians, plates and knives in hand, descended upon the still body. Three SS tanks, like three turkey vultures, positioned themselves in the square in front of Notre-Dame, guns aimed at the Police Préfecture and the glittering glass windows of Sainte Chapelle.
Sometimes, Denise was at Sabine’s side. Sometimes Sabine was marooned amid a crowd. In one moment, she was elated and in the next terrified. After the destruction of the Grand Palais, left to burn and pour black smoke into the sky, it was clear the Germans could turn Paris into an inferno. She was incredulous that they hadn’t. Every glorious building, monument, and bridge was mined. It would take a single order, a second of time, to turn the world’s most beautiful city into a pile of astonished dust.
On the evening of the fifth day of sporadic street fighting, with both hope and light fading, Sabine heard the first sounds of Liberation, the deep rolling waves of the church bells of Notre-Dame. From high in Montmartre, Sacré-Coeur answered, and soon from churches all over the city, the joyous pealing of bells heralded the arrival of the Allies and the imminent end of the Occupation. Windows were flung open, radios blared the Marseillaise and American jazz. People sang along, their voices breaking, or sat in their rooms and wept.
Denise pulled Sabine away from the window.
“It’s not safe yet.”
Not ten minutes after she gave her warning, a volley of gunfire from the German garrison mixed with the sound of the bells.
“We’ll wait until morning to go out. Let’s get drunk, Sabine, and smoke Gitanes.”
Sabine was exhausted, but exhilarated. Her thoughts were like a flock of startled birds, soaring and dipping in circles.
“We don’t smoke.”
“It’s easy. I’ve seen it in the pictures. You just squint your eyes and look into the distance through the smoke. You look exquisitely bored, as if you can’t even remember how the cigarette got into your hand.”
“And how did it? Where did you get Gitanes?”
Denise smiled sweetly.
“Ah. The man in the fedora,” Sabine laughed. “Are you finally going to tell me his name?”
“Perhaps. If I drink enough wine.”
The next day was one of wild contrasts. On one corner, people rushed to greet the French and American soldiers. They cheered and hollered and pressed gifts into their hands—dusty bottles of champagne from closet corners, good luck charms, flowers, fruit, kisses, and even rabbits given reprieve from balcony cages. But on other corners, infantry dug in to face the last menace of German resistance. Sabine and Denise wandered from place to place, staying on the periphery. Sometimes they waved and hugged the people next to them in the crowd. Sometimes they took cover and wished they hadn’t seen the grandmother leaping with joy, caught in mid-air by a sniper’s bullet, or the German soldier, his uniform in tatters, frantically pedalling a bicycle before a column of fast-moving tanks that passed over him as if he were nothing more than a bump in the road.
“I’ve seen enough,” Sabine said to her friend. “I’ll meet you back at the apartment.”
As she walked slowly back to Notre-Dame she witnessed a group of Parisians tearing down the hated German signposts, setting their own language free again, she supposed. She passed a young girl, thin as a willow switch, eating a bar of American chocolate with a look of reverence on her face as if she were discovering the sensuality of taste for the first time. She said hello to a man sitting alone at a sidewalk café. He was handing out old postcards of Paris as it had been before the war, inviting the world back to the city of his memory.
Sabine felt a kind of numbness as dusk fell softly over a free Paris, a natural hangover of the day’s emotional extremes. Gradually, the horizon became a blue-black line against an even darker sky. Everything that held light, street lamps, lit up windows, the moon, glowed full and bright. The night was too tender to abandon, so she began to wander the narrow streets east of the great cathedral, vacant now with the echoing quality of an empty stage after the players had shrugged off their roles and gone home.
She heard him, before she saw him, an indistinct shape at first, huddled in a doorway.
She took a step closer.
It was a soldier, and with a sharp intake of breath she saw it was a German soldier.
The Germans had ruined her life. They had laid waste to the House of Izieu. Their cruelty had pushed beyond any possible line of forgiveness. Pure hate blazed within her.
The German opened his eyes and looked at her.
She knew he was dying. She could step on his throat right now and he would be defenceless.
Still, he stared at her face and she saw his lips move.
She moved closer until he was less than an arm’s length away. She saw he was just a boy, probably no older than Théo or Arnold or Paul Niedermann. Perhaps he had crawled into the alley to hide or simply been abandoned here by those soldiers who could still run.
She knelt down and held his hand until he died. The moment was so brief, like a sigh.
She brushed her hand gently over his face, closing his eyes, and felt something dark lift away from her.
Afterwards, she remembered the weight and heat of his hand in hers, and how quickly his skin had cooled.
She left him where he had fallen and made her way back to the square in front of Notre-Dame. There she saw Denise running towards her. She moved with a lambent glow, partly because of the shining street lamps so long forbidden, and partly because she was in love. She reached for the arm of the man with her and smiled radiantly at Sabine. “This is Jake Shaw. He’s from England, and I’m going to marry him.”
Without the shadow cast by a fedora, Sabine saw a handsome and intelligent face under a tumble of blonde curls.
It was the night the war should have ended, but it didn’t.
Back in Belley where the streets were shrouded in darkness and the blackout curtains were drawn tight, Marie-Antoinette held still, barely breathing and listening intently.
She heard the knocks again. Three furtive knocks at her back door.
Marie-Antoinette lived in a two-bedroom apartment above a lingerie shop with a back door that could only be reached by a rarely used staircase. A person didn’t come upon it or climb it without intention.
She opened the door and couldn’t believe her eyes. At first she thought she must be looking at a ghost, but when she reached out her hands, the man she touched was solid and real. She pushed his sandy hair back from his face, and shook her head. “Léon.” She quickly pulled him inside and locked the door behind him. “My God, Léon. I thought—”
“I know. My sister warned me and I jumped out a window.”
He braced himself waiting for her reaction, some sign that she considered him a coward, but all he saw was a flash of joy before the sadness settled back into her green eyes. Still pretty, but she didn’t look the same. Something was gone, some spirit perhaps, some lightness. She had always been so extravagant, but now she seemed softer, maybe even vulnerable.
“You don’t look the same either,” she said. “Maybe it’s the beard.” She kept her voice light, but she was shocked at how gaunt he looked, how hollowed under the eyes. He may not be a ghost, but he was certainly haunted.
She led him to the sofa and leaned over to kiss his forehead. “Do you need anything? Are you hungry?” she asked.
“No. I just wanted to see you.”
She sat down beside him. “What happened? Where have you been?”
He was grateful he could stare straight ahead into the dim room and not have to see her face. He felt the images of that terrible day start to surface. “I’d only arrived maybe half an hour before the raid. I was upstairs with my sister. I swear I didn’t hear a thing. I’ve thought about it again and again and the Germans must’ve let the trucks glide down the hill, because I didn’t hear them. Only the sound of the children in the dining room.
“I was heading downstairs and I saw three men in plain clothes disappearing down the hall. One of them spoke to me, in French, without any accent. I can’t remember what he said. Then Suzanne, who’d gone down before me, turned back and told me to get out. It’s the Germans. Get out, she said. I jumped from the window and laid flat on the ground. If the Germans had bothered to look, they would’ve found me easily. I often wish they had. They took my parents, my sister, and my nephew. I delivered Max and Maurice from the boarding school in Belley right into their hands. If only I hadn’t picked them up on my way, they would’ve been safe.”
“If only. If only. That will only end in madness, Léon.”
“Have you heard anything? Have you heard from Sabine?”
“I sent the telegram. I found out the children were sent to Lyon and then immediately to Paris. To Drancy. They were all deported. That’s all I know.”
Léon shuddered. There was no place for his thoughts to settle that wasn’t a quagmire of guilt and anger and regret. Every day he had to struggle not to sink into the earth.
“Sabine?” he managed to ask.
“I’m sure she followed them to Paris and tried to intervene, but I can’t be certain where she is now. You haven’t told me where you’ve been.”
“Monsieur Perticoz has been hiding me in his barn. But his wife is worried that the farm is being watched. So I slipped away a couple of nights ago. I don’t want to put them in any more danger.”