by E. J. Swift
I hesitate, wanting to see more (because if she’s down here, then she got here, which means I must be able to get out). Then I switch off the torch. I hear her breathing, shallow and uneven. The thread of her voice comes through the dark. She’s speaking in French, but as in 1875 I understand her without effort.
“I’m hallucinating. This isn’t real. It’s no surprise, but I can’t let it get to me. I can’t—give in.”
A pause, and then she begins the mantra again.
I sit in silence, taking in what I’ve seen of the girl, her clothes, the little pile of provisions. Thinking about the date chalked on the keg room floor. The last thing I saw before the flare.
“I am real,” I venture at last. “My name’s Gabriela. What’s yours?”
“Shhh! I’m hallucinating. This isn’t real. I can’t give in.”
I’m about to turn the torch back on (interesting that the phone works at all, although as a tool for communication it’s useless) and try again, when another sound distracts us both. Footsteps, heavy on stairs. The girl stops speaking at once. I sense her folding in on herself, gathering her limbs together, making herself small. Instinctively, I do the same.
The footsteps are moving down a flight of stairs, on the other side of the wall behind my head. I wait, not knowing what this is but understanding we mustn’t be detected. They reach the bottom of the stairs. Two sets. Are they coming this way? I can no longer hear the girl’s breathing.
The footsteps pause. I hear the sound of a key turning in a lock, somewhere to the left. The wall must be very thin.
The door opens. Two people enter the adjacent room. I hear low laughter.
Then:
“—das schönste Mädchen—” It’s a male voice, young, the timbre light and pleasant.
The door shuts.
“Non...” Female.
“Ja, das Allerschönste—”
“In der Welt?”
“Ich sage dir die Wahrheit.”
“Vous dites de la merde.”
A pause. Then giggling. No words for a while. I hear the shifting of feet. The rasp of fabric. It seems to go on forever, though it’s probably only a couple of minutes. My stomach growls and the sound is impossibly loud. I curl inwards, trying to suppress it. Eventually the woman speaks.
“Je dois y aller.”
“Ich kann es kaum erwarten...”
“Demain, demain. Morgen, ja?”
At last there’s the sound of the door opening and closing, and the key turns from the far side. The footsteps begin to retreat, one set the light clatter of a woman’s heels, the other loud and heavy, creaking on the wooden staircase. Then silence.
“Are you there?” I say softly.
I hear the girl’s breathing, taut and terrified. I wait a few more moments and then I switch on the torch of my phone again. She is slumped against the wall, the blanket scrunched around her feet, her collar upturned, hands clenched on the lapels as though she’s holding in a scream and the scream is a living thing that might at any moment erupt from her throat. The effort of keeping it in is written all over her face. At her right collarbone is the bobbled patch of fabric on the coat, where the yellow star must have been torn away.
I rap gently on the wall to my left and hear what I now expect: the hollow sound of a false wall.
“What’s the date?” I ask, although in my heart I already know the answer.
She speaks slowly, stiffly. “The date?”
“Can you tell me what day it is?”
“Twentieth, twenty-first of July,” she says. “Twenty-second? I don’t know. They took everyone. Maman. Papa. Everyone. Then you appeared. Out of thin air. Like an angel. Or a devil. Or maybe you’re just a ghost.”
And she starts to laugh.
“WHAT’S YOUR NAME?” I ask quietly.
“Rachel. Rachel Clouatre.” She answers automatically. Perhaps she still believes I’m a figment, a hallucination. Better for me if I were. You can’t capture a hallucination, but you can very much capture an enemy agent.
“How did you escape?”
“I was at the conservatoire. I’ve been sleeping there overnight. Not going home. Maman thought it would be safer. After the first round-ups...”
“The music school? You’re a student?”
She looks at her hands. “A cellist. We moved here so I could study. I couldn’t afford to live here on my own. We should have stayed... we should have stayed in Limoges.”
Her eyes are brimming, but the tears when they come make silent tracks over her cheeks. She switches on her torch, giving us a bit more light in the confined space, and I put my phone away. I notice the papers by her side are covered in scribblings: words and musical notation, and heavy crossings out.
“As soon as it started I knew they’d be taken. They were dragging people from their homes—like cattle. Not German. French policemen. French. I wanted to go back, I wanted to go with them, I’d rather they took us all than separated us. But the director locked me in one of the practice rooms. I was in there for hours. Me and the piano. Someone had been practising Rachmaninov, the score was there. Concerto number three. At the end of the day he came to get me and there was someone with him. Madame Tournier. Our neighbour.”
Rachel blinks away the moisture from her eyes. She doesn’t bother to wipe her face.
“She saw them... taken.”
I feel my chest tightening as she tells me her story, the headache intensifying. Fucking hell. I have to help her, but I feel utterly helpless. Mad ideas flit through my head. Could she travel through the anomaly? Could I get her out—to my time? To Millie’s time, even? Surely anywhere would be safer than here. But I know only two things about the anomaly: it’s unpredictable, and if I believe the chronometrist, only I can use it. No, that’s insanity. She has to get out of Paris.
“You have to get out of Paris,” I say.
“Madame Tournier brought me here. She knows the owner, there’s been... others. I have to get to the Clos Montmartre. She’s set it up for tonight. Someone will meet us there.”
“The vineyard? It’s not far. I’ll help you.”
“A hallucination?”
“I’m real, I promise.”
“Even if you are, I can’t go anywhere. I don’t have the cello.”
“Look, I know you’re a musician. But you can’t afford to wait—especially if this Madame Tournier has arranged for someone to get you out.”
“You don’t understand,” she says. “My parents gave it to me. The cello is them. And when I don’t know when I’ll see them again—” She swallows. “I’m not leaving without it.”
Her expression tells me she won’t be persuaded. Not that that’s going to stop me trying.
“But you can’t stay here indefinitely. Christ, the Moulin Rouge is next door, there’ll be Germans camping out there every night. That one just now—what if you’d coughed or sneezed, alerted them...”
I trail off. My words aren’t making an impression at all. Rachel stares at her boots.
“Yes. It’s ironic, isn’t it. They hate us. They describe us as animals. And yet they’re happy to listen to Offenbach as long as the can-can girls are flashing their underwear. Some people I know are playing with Radio Paris now.” She kneads the lapels of her coat. I imagine the pressure of those fingertips on cello strings, and then I think of piles of coats, piles of glasses, gold fillings, and I can’t suppress a shudder.
With sudden violence she says, “Paris makes me sick.”
Even before I speak I know what I’m about to voice is a terrible idea. And I know equally, prophetically, that there isn’t a choice. The last time I came through the anomaly, I fucked up. I gave the chronometrist exactly what she wanted and I left Millie behind. This time, I have a chance to do something worthwhile.
“Where is the cello, Rachel?”
“At the conservatoire. I couldn’t take it with Tournier, it would have attracted attention, she said. We had to move fast. It was strange. There w
ere people, just the same as always, but the streets felt so empty. So alone.”
“I’ll get it for you.”
“You will?”
I see a spark of hope in her eyes.
“Yes,” I say determinedly. “Tell me where to go.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
RACHEL’S LIFE: GROWING up in a small town outside Limoges, an only child. There had been hopes for a younger sister or brother, but a miscarriage in the second trimester discouraged further attempts. Too young to understand or feel the impact of this early sorrow, Rachel became the centre of her parents’ world, as they stood at the nucleus of hers. Her mother, a natural worrier, wished only to safeguard her from the least and worst of life’s perils, whereas her father would have given her anything she wanted, as far as their means allowed.
Rachel was eight years old when the Clouatres attended a concert at the local hall and she heard for the first time the instrument that would become an extension of her soul. The cellist was a man in his fifties, wide and suave with a dapper moustache, and the revue was Bach’s Cello Suites. Looking back, he had not been the most accomplished player, but nonetheless the magic of that first encounter had not diminished in Rachel’s mind. Quite the reverse: it had magnified in both depth and intensity, so that now, familiar with the Suites as both an audience and a musician, Rachel could overlay upon her memory the exact positioning of the cellist’s fingers and the sweep of his bow across the bridge, as she relived the sound of its plaintive voice flooding that draughty town hall, punctuated by the occasional cough or shuffle of feet.
Rachel knew at once that this was her calling, but pursuit of her dream was not so straightforward. Cellos, and cello lessons, were expensive, and there were no teachers within the town where Rachel lived, which meant she would have to travel. In the end, it was Rachel’s uncle who stepped in. He had a small but successful business in Limoges, and no children of his own. A half-size cello appeared, and lessons were arranged. Once a week, Rachel got a lift by horse and cart to the station, took the train to Limoges and was met by Uncle Andre’s secretary, who escorted her to her tutor’s house and back to the station an hour later. Rachel emerged from these sessions transformed, a butterfly from a chrysalis, only awaiting the epiphany of flight.
Time in school felt wasted. She dreamed in crotchets and quavers, practising arpeggios against a ruler, blocking out the words of the teacher in exchange for the curlicues of Bach. Her grades, previously above average, dropped so far that her parents threatened the removal of the cello (because what happened if the cello did not succeed? Rachel could not imagine a life without it, but her parents could, and had). Rachel reformed overnight, becoming the most attentive student in class, but still it felt unreal. She was going through the motions until life could begin. She was waiting for wings.
Aged fifteen, she performed her own revue at the town’s summer fête. More than one parent in the audience leaned over to the Clouatres and said, “Your child has talent,” which was the kind of compliment usually delivered only under extreme duress or with the understanding that reciprocal praise should be forthcoming, and Rachel’s parents began to believe it could be true.
It has to be the Paris Conservatoire, said her tutor. Nothing else is worth your time. It was 1936. Rachel would be applying for admission in 1939. She needed more regular lessons, so the family moved into Limoges. It didn’t suit them—they missed the clean air and the open sky—but the tutor gave an extra hour a week for no charge. Rachel outgrew her cello. It was time, the tutor said, for a real investment.
Rachel’s mother was not so easily convinced. For years she had nurtured dreams of her only daughter’s wedding, a lavish but solemn affair. She could hear quite clearly the rabbi’s words, the compliments of the guests; she could see her daughter’s face, serene through the veil at the Bedeken, and later the circles of dancing, and the shadowy yet undeniably handsome countenance of her future son-in-law as bride and groom were lifted high upon their chairs. Year by year, they had set money aside for precisely this event. It was their life savings, and Rachel didn’t want it. She had no interest in marriage, or even men.
“When I’m a professional musician, I’ll have to go on tour,” she said. “I won’t have time for a husband, and who’ll want to marry someone who’s never home?”
Rachel’s mother secretly agreed with this, but to say so was impossible. She had to retain hope, even as it was somehow proposed that the wedding-money could become the cello-money, and Rachel’s mother could never quite describe how it happened, but one foggy morning they found themselves on the train to Paris: herself, her hopelessly indulgent husband, her daughter. There they chose the cello in which Rachel would invest the next three years of her life. This time, although their life savings had been almost depleted, Uncle Andre was not invited to contribute. There were limits, thought Rachel’s mother.
For her audition piece to the Paris Conservatoire, Rachel played the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. Nobody was surprised when she was offered a scholarship.
Nine months later, Paris was under occupation.
Chapter Thirty-Four
RACHEL HAS A key to the storeroom so she can move around after hours, but she doesn’t want me to take the risk of leaving before closing time. We argue in whispers over the logistics whilst I chew on some dry bread to assuage my hunger. If I’m to recover the cello and get back to the vineyard in time to meet her, I can’t afford to wait. Reluctantly she agrees, perhaps because she still doesn’t believe I’m real.
She lets me out (“Don’t get caught, figment”) and—dressed in a spare set of clothes from the wardrobe of Madame Tournier, neighbour and escapist accomplice—I ascend the wooden stairs of Millie’s establishment. I find the door to the front of the bar and pause, listening to the sounds of the mid-evening clientele. Clink of glasses, merry laughter, conversations in French and in German. The bar is busy. Good. It will be easier for me to slip through.
I adopt a confused expression and am reaching for the door handle when it opens from the other side. A young woman stands in the frame, chic and curvaceous, a dash of lipstick in lively contrast to her waitress’s uniform. Seeing me, she frowns.
“C’est privé.”
“La salle de bain?”
She opens the door wider, points. “À droite.”
“Merci.”
The waitress’s features ripple, and her lipsticked mouth drops open.
“You’re on—the right track, my dear. Never fear.”
“What?”
She blinks. Frowns.
“Madame?”
I step through the door, turn right for the bathroom and lock myself into a cubicle, trembling. Was that her? Can she get in and out of a body that fast? She wanted me to come here. It had to be her who wrote that date on the floor. 22-07-1942. It appears that once again I’m doing her bidding for a purpose I don’t understand. Which makes it potentially a very bad proposition indeed.
But now Rachel’s counting on me.
The seconds tick by as I weigh up the alternatives, and realise there are none. I made a promise.
When I come out of the cubicle, another woman is stood at the mirror, applying powder to her cheeks. In her smart two-piece suit she looks the essence of a Parisienne. Despite Tournier’s clothes, I feel as far from Parisian as it is possible to feel. I feel like a fraud, which I am. I remind myself that impostor syndrome will not help Rachel and exit the bathroom, walking through the front of the bar as quickly as my pleasure-seeking alter ego permits. Patrons are grouped around cabaret tables, engaged in leisurely discussion. Decanters of wine glow crimson under ambient lighting. I don’t allow myself to look at the German uniforms, not directly, though the grey-green fabric wants to draw my gaze, to make me stare. I keep my face muscles soft, relaxed, and I don’t catch anybody’s eye. It’s only as I exit the premises that the voice of the waitress comes back to me and I realise I heard that same voice earlier, with the German soldier, downsta
irs. The knowledge shakes me: there is more than one agenda at play inside Millie’s.
Outside it is still light. A late summer evening, a heat on the air, though the hairs on my arms are raised beneath Tournier’s jacket. I expected shadowy streets, a furtive, even frightened sensibility about the civilians in this occupied city. But the vibrancy of the scene is astonishing. Bars are open, terraces packed, civilian women suave and elegant in red or black hats, everyone is smoking. A woman sails past on a bicycle, heading towards Pigalle. To the right of the Moulin Rouge (SPECTACLE PERMANENT), a large billboard above the Brasserie Cyrano Dupont declares Tout Est Bon. In fact, if it weren’t for the queue of German troops lining up outside the Moulin, there would be no indication of the war I know is consuming the greater part of the world.
The sight of that queue propels me to move. On the last occasion I travelled through time, my French went unquestioned, but at that point in history being English didn’t make you an enemy of occupying forces. If I’m caught and interrogated, I haven’t a hope of making it back to safety, never mind locating the hapless cello.
Avenue Jean-Jaurès is my destination. It’s in the nineteenth arrondissement, directly east of here, and if I were back in my home time I could walk it in half an hour. Unfortunately, between me and the music school lie the cabarets of Montmartre in their dozens, and each of them is brimming with Germans.
DETAILS I GLEAN from Rachel before I leave Millie’s: curfew starts at nine pm, and the conservatoire closes at half past eight. I’ll be able to get into the building after that because the students tend to practise late, and some of them sleep there to avoid curfew. (By this point it’s already gone eight according to Rachel’s watch, and the question has to be posed as to how exactly I’m going to get in. “Through the window,” says Rachel promptly. She draws me a map on a clean sheet of paper, and marks the designated window. “This is getting more and more like Indiana Jones,” I say, and Rachel says, “What?”) Then my questions become necessarily broader (“Just to check—what year is it again?”) and Rachel’s answers (“Nineteen forty-two”) gain a corresponding air of disbelief. I’m not from here, I remind her. And if I’m going to succeed, it has to look like I am. No, she agrees; you are a figment. Figment or not, I say. You go with Tournier when she comes. I’ll come to the vineyard. I’ll bring the cello.