“She’s alive? Annette?”
“It is true.”
“I’m …” Marshall cast about for words. “I don’t know what to say. How did you find her?” He hardly knew if he was awake.
“We were searching in Paris, but she lives in a village southwest of Angoulême, in the Charentes. Her name now is Bouyer.”
“Bouyer? Are her parents still alive?” Marshall couldn’t collect his thoughts.
“I don’t know,” said Nicolas. “I spoke to her, but she didn’t mention her family. Listen, Marshall, she is eager to see you. At first she seemed hesitant, and I wasn’t certain that she remembered you, but she spoke with great eagerness after I explained to her how my family knew you. She was very gracious then, as if I had used a password!”
Two days earlier, Marshall had telephoned Nicolas about the disappointing end to his search for Robert Lebeau. He didn’t feel like tracking down someone at a mental institution, he had said. Now he said, “Nicolas, you are like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.”
“I should have accomplished this much sooner, but I foolishly followed some false trails.”
Marshall rose from bed and stood by the window. Across the street several similar cars nested in a row. A small truck was backing into a narrow space. He took a deep breath. He was awake now.
Nicolas apologized for limiting his search to Paris. “I found her through another résistante in the Bourgogne line, a woman who knew her and had seen her in Paris a few years ago. She should have been easy to find, because so many aviateurs have stayed in touch with the people who helped them. I must tell you that I was deeply afraid the Vallons had met a bad fate, and I was overjoyed to locate your Annette.”
Annette had suggested that Marshall come on Wednesday afternoon for tea, and Nicolas had the directions for getting there.
“The train to Angoulême is simple,” Nicolas said. “I would drive you, but it is necessary to tutor my pupils.”
“Thanks, Nicolas. Don’t worry. I think I’ll rent a car down there and go exploring.”
Marshall scribbled down Annette’s telephone number and promised to come to Chauny soon for Sunday lunch.
35.
IT FELT GOOD TO HANDLE A VEHICLE AGAIN. FROM THE TRAIN station at Angoulême, in a boxy Citroën with a balky choke, he headed toward Cognac, an affluent town near the Atlantic coast. After Angoulême, the expanse of vineyards opened out—the grapevines responsible for cognac, the fine brandy that Marshall never drank but that was plentiful in the dollhouse bottles served to airline passengers. The vines were in full growth, twisting and hugging close together, supported by wires and pruned at the top into flat hedge roofs. Grapes. How did anyone take an interest in something so specific and yet so broad? Of course he knew that for the workers vineyards were like the coal mines—not a choice, usually, just an ineluctable fate.
He was afraid she wouldn’t really remember him from 1944. In a brief conversation on the telephone the day before, she had been cordial, and although he still pictured her as the girl in his memory, her voice was high-pitched and unfamiliar.
Following the directions she had given him, he left the main route to Cognac and drove south a few miles to the sign for her village. It was a small farming community, with no trace of commerce or wealth. Slowly, he followed several turns until he found the street, then parked at #4, a large wooden portal, arched at the top. There was a smaller door with a bell rope. After pulling the bell and hearing its distant interior clang, he glanced around. It was a quiet street, like a back alley. He saw a field and a couple of gardens. Opposite, a lone white dog paced inside a fence.
A young woman wearing an apron and carrying a rake appeared at the door. Mme Bouyer was expecting him, she told him as she let him in. A large, regal brown dog appeared, barking until the woman quieted him. The dog sniffed Marshall’s hand, then bowed gracefully.
Marshall was in a large courtyard, enclosed by several small buildings joined together. At the far end was a two-story stone house, covered with large-leaved ivy. The walkway was stone.
“Watch your step, monsieur.”
The buildings seemed disused, the courtyard a bit shabby. Bees buzzed through the thick ivy, and a bird flew out of it as Marshall approached the house. The place seemed to be a run-down farm, in the process of renovation. Gardening implements, a wheelbarrow, and various storage bins were scattered about the courtyard. Two men were working with a pile of stones. The woman with the rake rapped on a door of rough wood, leading off the terrace. Then she moved toward the workers and began to rake the gravel of the driveway.
When Annette opened the door he did not know her right away. Her features had filled out, and her figure was mature. She gave him an enthusiastic three-cheek kiss—left, right, left. He bent to her, her soft cheek pressing his lightly. Her scent was something fresh, an herb of some kind, he thought, not the cloying sweetness of perfume.
“Do you really remember me?” he said, employing his best French.
“Of course I do! But we never knew if you returned home safely.” She spoke in English.
He hung his head slightly, and she touched his arm. He tried to explain—the war was over. He went back to the States. Flying. Not a letter writer—and he didn’t know where to write her.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, dismissing the subject with a wave.
Her manner and her clothing—a long-sleeved blouse, long pants, and sturdy brown shoes—were unpretentious. Her medium-length waved hair was still dark brown and lustrous. He could see her mother in her lively eyes, her delicate eyebrows. She wore her age well, he thought. She was attractive.
A great smile broke over Annette’s face as she stepped back to survey him.
“The first pilot who appeared at our apartment in Paris was such a surprise. I came home from school one afternoon, and there at the table, eating some soup, was an enormous boy, a young man, with blue eyes and blond hair. I thought at first—a German!”
“The Gestapo dropped in for tea?” Marshall said, laughing.
“He was an American! My first American. I was entranced. I have forgotten his name. He stayed only one night. Of course I wanted to know everything about him, and all about America. I was smitten! He was an aviateur, and his plane had crashed, and my parents were hiding him. And so it began. And then, one day, you.” She smiled.
Her vibrancy was what he remembered.
“You have a fine head of hair,” she said. “And the gray sides are so distinguished.”
Reaching, she touched his hair. Then, turning, she led him into the house, through a small hallway to a dining room.
“Champagne first,” she said. “It is necessary.”
She had the bottle waiting, in ice, on a small side table, and he volunteered to pop the cork, even though he was unaccustomed to the task. It worked, to his relief. The bottle didn’t spew, like those in the movies, and he hoped she wasn’t disappointed.
“Let’s not have it here,” she said, smiling. “Let’s sit on the terrace. We must toast to our reunion.”
Details of her appearance began to fall into place for him. Her teeth—the lower canine that jutted out at a slight angle, the uncommonly even uppers. He had forgotten them until this moment.
“Do you live here with your family?” he asked, after they were settled on the stone terrace in sling-backed deck chairs, separated by a small, lopsided table covered with a blue print cloth. The dog settled near her chair.
“My son is often here on weekends. My mother comes from Normandy when she is able, or I go there. She lives near Saint Lô. My daughter lives in Cognac and is here almost every day, but she is in Saint Lô now with her children. I will join them later this week for Maman’s birthday.”
“I remember your parents so well,” he said.
She nodded, smiling faintly.
“They were like parents to me,” he continued. The champagne almost made him sneeze. “Your mother is in good health?”
“Ye
s, she is well. I would like for her to move here from Normandy. Saint Lô is too far.” She turned her head away. “But my father—oh, he died many years ago.”
“I’m sorry. He was a good man.”
“Oui.”
Marshall hesitated. He said, “I remember him cursing the boches!”
She smiled. “My mother will be very happy to know I have seen you.”
“I remember how kind she was,” Marshall said.
Annette lifted her glass. “You remembered me as the girl in the blue beret,” she said. “This is what Monsieur Albert told me. Is it not so? But our signals varied. Sometimes I wore a Scottish scarf. One of the aviateurs wrote me, and he remembered me as the girl in the red socks! The beret was a thing I had to wear to school.”
He laughed. “The girl in the red socks. It doesn’t have the same ring to it.”
“During the war we couldn’t get stockings. We wore socks, usually white or red. Oh, how I hated them.”
The two workmen and the woman with the rake were leaving, and Annette crossed the courtyard to speak with them. Marshall could not hear their words distinctly. She was friendly with them, and he saw them all laughing. He sipped more of the champagne. The workers left, and she rejoined him, apologizing for the interruption.
“The work on this place is without end,” she said, laughing.
“It’s very grand,” he said. “I’m surprised to find that you’re a country woman now. You knew Paris so well.”
“My husband and I bought this place twenty years ago. It had been a working farm until 1950, and then it fell into ruin, but we saw the possibilities. This has been a slow, evolving project. We restored the barn and the granary. And the distillerie across the courtyard we made into a food-storage place—like a cold place? For winter? We renovated the house enough to make it livable. Let’s see, we lived in Paris until 1960, but his family is of this village, so we bought this. Oh, it is not luxury, I can tell you truly.” She laughed. “No central heating until about ten years ago. We had only the fireplaces. And you remember from the apartment in Paris what it was like with no heat, or maybe a few lumps of coal for that stove we had in the front room. I remember in Paris when there was no heat at all.” She seemed to shiver.
“Pardon me for asking, but where is your husband?”
“He is no more. Maurice was a veterinarian. He had his practice over there, in what was once the granary.” She pointed across the courtyard to the center building. “He was very happy here. He had his animals, his treatment rooms, his kennels.”
“What happened to him? Or am I out of line?”
She set her face, erasing her radiating smile lines. “It was an accident. Kicked by a horse. The hard shoe hit his skull in the most vulnerable place.” With a flash of anger, she said, “He took chances. He was the type of person who could walk into the middle of a dogfight—or thought he could—and stop it. He was so used to working with animals that he thought they trusted him. He thought he could reason with them.” She shook her head sadly.
“I’m sorry.” Marshall murmured what he hoped were the appropriate comments. “How long ago?” he asked.
“Five years in November. It didn’t have to happen, but it did. I can accept it. That is that. Some things happen that are neither just nor unjust. They are part of the nature of the universe.”
Marshall noticed that she had blamed her husband for his fate while deciding on the indifference of the universe. But there was nothing to argue.
“So you have a daughter and a son?” he asked.
Her face lit up again. For some time, she spoke proudly of the accomplishments of her children and the joys of her small grandchildren. He liked the way she used her hands so expressively as she talked. They were like little ballet dancers.
“And you, Marshall? Please tell me everything.”
Marshall told her about his career and his family, trying not to dwell on the disappointment over retirement. As he told about Loretta, Annette reacted sympathetically, then poured him some more champagne.
“Were you happy?” she asked.
“I thought we were.” He paused, wondering what to say. “But after she died, I’ve been asking myself what that meant—to be happy.”
“You go through self-examination, I know. When someone dies, you start rearranging everything. It’s what we have to do, and you are behind. I’m ahead of you.”
She gazed directly into his eyes. He moved his glass around on the wobbly table.
In a swoop, he told her how his retirement had led him back to the crash site and then to France, in search of the people who had helped him during the war.
“And I am here!” She clapped her hands and laughed gaily.
Her sweetness, her vitality, had survived the years.
WHEN SHE EXCUSED HERSELF, he sat there in a champagne buzz. A bird stirred in the ivy, and a light breeze made the ivy vibrate. He felt as though he were inside a network of ivy, throbbing. He saw the dog rise, turn around, then settle down again. Nearby, a striped gray cat was washing its face.
Annette brought a tray of cake and chocolate, with a pot of tea.
After she had arranged their plates and poured the tea, he asked her how she became involved in guiding airmen through the streets of Paris.
“Oh, I am delighted to tell you this. My parents were outraged by the Occupation. Every evening there was intense political discussion, and I heard all of it. They were fervent Gaullists—that is, for France. And Charles de Gaulle—appropriately named!—was the symbol of France.”
Annette’s smile broke out. “It was easy to play the innocent schoolgirl, and it was amusing to confound the Germans. They tried to treat the schoolgirls with politeness. If you were on the train and they wanted to sit, you were supposed to stand and let them sit, so one always took the opportunity to make that difficult. When they asked for directions, we liked to send them the wrong way. Once, an officer was looking for Napoléon’s Tomb, and I sent him to the Père Lachaise! And when they weren’t looking I liked to draw the Croix de Lorraine everywhere—you know, the symbol of the Free French.
“Then in 1943, my parents began working for the réseau Bourgogne. You must understand that at the time people in the Résistance didn’t know there was a Résistance beyond two or three names. We had no way of knowing how extensive the network was, or even if it was succeeding, but my parents believed they had to do something, and this was a way to be résistant without violence.
“Then I began to participate as a courrier. I took the train to friends in Versailles and brought back tracts for clandestine distribution. I hid them inside my schoolbook bindings and inside the seams of my book sack—my vache. I found this little job very thrilling. I grew more serious then, and I was more careful about teasing the Germans.”
ALL AFTERNOON MARSHALL and Annette continued to catch up on their lives and to reminisce about wartime. After the war, she taught school in Paris, and later in Cognac; her children had married well; her sister, Monique, taught music in Paris. Annette’s manner was warm, filled with laughter. He felt at ease with her. He could sit there indefinitely.
Eventually, he couldn’t help asking about Robert. He told her about searching for him through Caroline and recognizing him in her box of photos.
“I remembered him so well, but that story seems to have a sad ending.”
Annette nodded. “Yes. Robert is a sad story. I can’t settle that in my mind. But yes, the time he worked with us in the Bourgogne—that was a challenge for all of us.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I assume so. But I do not know where he is at present.”
“I always pictured him out on daring missions for the Resistance,” Marshall said. “I imagined him having secret meetings with saboteurs.”
“Oh, no. He was only a convoyeur for the pilots,” she said. “The Bourgogne line strictly limited itself to helping the aviateurs. Robert’s parents were grocers, and they were forced to supply the Germans, b
ut Robert was able to get food from them to help us feed the aviateurs.”
“His daughter should know this,” Marshall said.
“It was very risky, but we depended on him. He probably was your escort on the train.”
“My memories are vague, but yes, I think he led me south from Paris. He seemed so mysterious, like he was involved in major operations.”
“There was no mystery about Robert. He was too much not mysterious, truly. I always trembled for him. He was often in danger.”
“Tell me about him.”
Hesitating, she offered him another piece of chocolate instead. Marshall was afraid he was asking for too much information, but then she began, slowly.
“At first, he made the false ID papers for the aviateurs. We fed the evaders and hid them for a short while, and then he escorted them on the train to Perpignan, where they would cross the Pyrenees with a local guide. But one day Robert arrived at our door, desperate and anxious. He had been arrested on his return from Perpignan. The French police on the train became suspicious of his papers.”
“Did he carry a fake ID for himself?” Marshall asked.
“Oh, yes. As you know, all young French men—age twenty to twenty-four—were sent off to the work camps in Germany. He was about twenty-one, but he contrived to look older.
“That day he arrived to us, badly shaken.
“ ‘Hide me,’ he said. ‘I was arrested!’
“ ‘But how did you escape?’ asked Maman.
“ ‘I jumped from the train down the embankment. But no one shot at me. I took two different trains until at last I arrived here.’
“The French police had kept his papers. He was disturbed, but he hadn’t lost his courage. He thought the police had let him go in spite of their suspicions. That happened sometimes, even with the Germans. Once he and my father were escorting aviateurs from Belgium, and he noticed that the German police seemed to recognize that there were aviateurs with them. But then the Germans looked the other way! Maybe it was too much trouble to arrest them. Or maybe it was only that they were looking forward to their beer and sausage. Still, it was all very dangerous.
The Girl in the Blue Beret Page 19