“Does your daughter treat you badly, the way I disown my father?” Caroline asked, frowning.
“No. She’s a good daughter.”
“And I’m a bad one?”
“No. Please. I don’t mean that. It’s just more complicated. Things are always difficult between parents and their children.”
She nodded thoughtfully.
He said, “I have it on good authority that your father was very brave in the war. I feel sure there had to be goodness in him.”
She resumed rubbing one of the green apples industriously.
He continued. “Anyway, I also wanted to say I’m sorry I was so overbearing with you—how do you say, too much the commander?”
“You’re sweet, Marshall. Are you sure you won’t marry me and take me to America? To Kentucky?” She grinned and squeezed his arm.
“The dog would be a problem,” he said.
HE REVISITED THE COLONNADE on the rue de Rivoli, where Annette had taken him to have his photo made.
“It was the photomaton at the Louvre store on the corner at the rue Marengo,” she had said last week. “I took the pilots on the Métro to the Palais Royal stop, and you waited in the Tuileries, across the street.”
He tried to get that straight in his mind, but standing here again, he realized that the corner where the photomaton had been was not directly across from the Tuileries, as he had recalled. The gardens were some distance down the street. It made little sense that she would have him wait so far away from the photomaton. With millions of people misremembering a war, could anyone ever get straight what had happened?
At the Colonnade, he stopped at a souvenir shop and on a whim purchased a blue beret for Annette. He bought a black one for himself—to commemorate 1944, when he was Julien Baudouin, stonemason.
42.
“I DON’T REALLY REMEMBER YOU, YOU KNOW,” SAID THE DELICATE woman at the café table. She was carefully stirring two lumps of sugar into her tea. She wore a thin gray scarf knotted at her neck, as if she might be slightly chilly.
“I do remember you—just a little,” Marshall answered. “I lived at your apartment for about two weeks.”
“Bien sûr. There were so many of you. But I am very happy to make your acquaintance once more.” Her smile was genuine but her eye contact uneasy.
Annette had said that her younger sister, Monique, lived in Paris, and she had suggested that Marshall call her. Marshall had been hesitant. This morning, however, only a couple of days before seeing Annette again, he decided to look her up.
Monique had a soft, shy manner. Her hands were nervous, and her voice was thin. They chatted about Paris in the old days, Monique’s parents, and Marshall’s flying career. Marshall told her about finding the Alberts, and Monique mentioned her husband, two children. Their daughter was at Boston College.
“I’m glad you have found my sister,” said Monique, touching her lips with her small napkin. “She has had a very difficult way.”
“Losing her husband must have been hard. But she seems to be emerging, don’t you think? I admire her spirit. She’s full of life, like I remember her. There was a special quality—”
“That’s not all, monsieur,” said Monique, leaning forward. “She won’t tell you about it, probably, unless you probe. I can see you don’t even know.”
Marshall was at a loss. “What do you mean?” he asked.
Monique paused. Then, spearing him with her eyes, she said, “In the spring of 1944, not long after you say you were with us, Annette and our parents were arrested and sent to the concentration camps in Germany. I was left behind. I did not see my mother and sister for more than a year. And my father did not return.”
Marshall froze. He stared at his hands. He had never been so shocked. For long moments, he heard and saw nothing. He couldn’t remember later what he had said then. Monique’s eyes seemed haunted. They were the color of Annette’s eyes. He remembered only what Monique said as they parted.
“I’m sorry, monsieur. I can’t talk about it. Perhaps my sister will tell you, but it is very hard for her. You comprehend? Even if you ask her, she won’t offer it easily.”
43.
ON THE TRAIN TO ANGOULÊME, HE STARED OUT THE WINDOW, hardly seeing the landscape. Having risen at five, he arrived at the Gare Montparnasse in time for an early train. But even after he bought his ticket he thought maybe he should turn back, postpone this trip until he had gathered himself. He had no idea what he should say or do when he saw Annette. Nightmare newsreels ran though his mind. Piles of skeleton people, bulldozers coming toward them, one or two arms waving feebly. A young girl and her mother, shrunken and curled. He saw skeleton people stuffed in bunks, skeleton people dressed in stripes. He saw gaping mouths. In a sealed room vapors hissed from the ceiling.
He knew so little—mainly headlines and film clips, the shocking revelations at the end of the war. Gold teeth and fillings yanked and stockpiled. Adolf Eichmann. Himmler. Barbed wire. The open pits, the bulldozers, the poison-spitting showers, the monstrous ovens. How did she ever survive?
He carried a copy of Le Monde but did not read it. Next to him a middle-aged woman with a feather in her hat was reading a paperback. Across the aisle were two teenagers, an amorous couple jumpy with the freshness of physical attraction. A dozen or so smartly dressed people were returning from Paris, laden with packages, exchanging tales of museums and theaters. Marshall’s mind emptied them out, emptied out the rough plush seats, turning the car into a slow, creaky thing with slats on the sides to allow livestock to breathe. In this car he positioned how many? A hundred? Two hundred? Standing pressed together, unable to move. Darkness. His mind relentlessly measured out the space. Two hundred, three hundred?
He looked out at the scenery flashing by. The farmland was lush and green—patterned fields with artfully drawn hedgerows. It seemed so calm and orderly. When he rode the night train from Paris to Toulouse in the spring of 1944, he saw at dawn the vacant fields, tinged mint green, and he was sad that the farmers had to grow food for their enemy, not their own people. He thought he remembered feeling this. But maybe not. His thoughts then centered on saving his own hide—staying quiet, keeping a wary eye on the German soldiers on the train, steeling himself to show no surprise if there was a loud noise. He was supposed to be a deaf-mute. He remembered how he had hidden his head behind a newspaper. He dozed and pretended to doze. Another airman was at the rear of the car. They were to have no contact, pass no signals. Robert was in the front of the car, and another girl guide, who seemed a bit older than Annette, rode in the car behind. The other airmen in the group were scattered throughout the train.
Now the conductor operated on Marshall’s ticket. The station of Tours was already being called, and the train would arrive in Angoulême soon. For a moment, Marshall saw in the conductor the outline of a German officer asking for his papers.
Monique said Annette might talk if he asked, but he didn’t know whether he should. It was time he did something right, he thought, but he didn’t know what that was.
44.
“YOU ARE HERE AGAIN!” ANNETTE SAID, OPENING HER ARMS WIDE like her smile.
While she performed the three-cheek kiss, he breathed in the lavender on her skin, in her hair.
“I use lavender for everything,” she explained. “My husband used it on the animals. It was good for their coats. It assassinated the insects.”
She approved of his new boots.
They sat on her terrace again, and Bernard, who had greeted him happily, established himself on the stones between them.
“We are at leisure!” she said. “We have nothing that must be done. We are here, and we have a beautiful summer day.”
Her twinkling eyes contained irony, humor, history, depth. She was full of laughter, and her hands were animated, her manners less formal than before. Something had changed. Just as he was drawing back, she seemed to be advancing.
She stared into his eyes. “It is still hard to believe that
you came to find me so many years after the war. You are the only one. I couldn’t search for any of you. I wanted to let the past go. I was in my life, each day—a son, a daughter, a husband, the animals.
“There was only one of the boys who was contemptuous of our circumstances. He demanded his cigarettes. He complained about our food.” She laughed. “I took him on a tour of Paris. I showed him the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, everything, and he was disdainful. I asked him, ‘Do you have anything like that in America?’ and he said, ‘No, but if we wanted stuff like this, we would buy it!’ ”
“An exceptionally ugly American,” Marshall said. “We’re not all like him.”
“No.” She smiled. “I do not know what happened to him. I did not go forth to find any of you. I had enough warm memories, and I wanted to keep them.”
“You and your family took a lot of risks,” he ventured.
“It was as though we had started on a rough crossing together, my parents and I, and we had chosen the most arduous course. As if we had a rowboat when we needed a battleship.”
“You were just a girl,” he said, after a moment. “How could your parents involve you? I mean, sending a young girl out to do Resistance work. It seems much too dangerous.”
She laughed. “My parents were very strict! At the table with adults, we did not speak. We listened. But during the war, my parents released me! They set me free! Ironic, is it not? During the Occupation, when no one was free, I was freed!”
Her exuberant tone shifted, and she leaned forward.
“My parents understood the perils, but it was, for them, the greatest emergency. Young or old, we had to do whatever the war demanded. Our shame is that many French people did nothing. Or even worse, some aided the Germans.”
She paused. “Some of the aviateurs were with us only a day or an hour, and some—like you—for longer. When you were with us, the Gestapo had a thousand eyes. It was very dangerous to move you south on the train, even though the snows were melting and the passage through the mountains was easing. But the Gestapo was behind every bush, and they had broken some of the escape lines. The Bourgogne survived, when others did not. We had to wait for the right moment to send you out.”
“I was stupid,” he said. “I didn’t really know the risks you ran.”
“It makes me chill,” she said, holding herself against imaginary drafts. “And yet it makes me glow with warmth to have you here, to remember the good moments. We were young. We were open.”
Her smile made him see the young girl in her again. He looked away.
She said, “When you first appeared from Angoulême in that large Citroën, I thought I was dreaming. Could it be true that one of my boys had returned and was looking for me? I had often thought of a path back to that time, with those pilots we helped. And yet it was so hard.
“I must confess—when you first came from Paris, I wasn’t even sure I remembered you. I mean, I knew who you were, and I recall your stay with us. But I wasn’t sure I recognized you. Then the next day on our drive, I remembered how you laughed. It was very specific, and it filled me with joy and anticipation. When I saw how eagerly you listened to Odile tell of her parachutists—how fervently you wanted to know the past, I was so glad you found me! This week last, while you were away, I turned it over in my mind. It is very complicated. The war is always with me, and yet it is not with me. I have wanted to remember and wanted to forget. Is it not true for you, as well? My own past seems like a stranger’s sometimes. It has so little to do with how things are now. Now I live normally. Then, nothing was normal.
“I began to look forward to your return today. I grew more eager. In my mind I began reliving what had happened. And I kept telling it in my mind. Again and again I was insistent in my mind. I made you listen. I am not sure you wanted to listen. I could not stop myself.”
Marshall tried to speak, but he stalled again. He thought about the men of wartime France—defeated, unable to protect their families. The humiliation must have been excruciating. He thought about M. Vallon, his elegant brown suit.
Marshall thought Annette would have told him everything then, but she grew quiet, and he did not press her.
THEY HIKED AT A PARK near Cognac. The trails were wooded and moderately inclined. The hike was vigorous, and his boots were fine. The day was balmy, not hot, and walking offered them a growing intimacy—the two of them together, out in nowhere. When the trails ascended, she went ahead, and conversation dwindled. He regarded her energy and enthusiasm with wonder, not able to square it with the dark imagery in his mind.
She had made a small picnic lunch, which he carried in his new backpack. He also carried a canteen of water, but she wanted wine with a meal, with glasses, so he carried those too. She had fruit and cheese in her little pack. He had not yet given her the beret he had bought for her. He was still unsure how appropriate the gift was.
They paused near a waterfall that emptied into a churning green pool. The rush of the water obliterated the sounds of other people on the trail, and the faint spray cooled them as they sat on a flat rock and spread the picnic on a blue floral-patterned cloth.
“This is a romantic spot,” he said carefully. “We should be young again.”
“Pfft! In France, remember, age is different. The old are always young in their hearts.”
“I hope so.” Caroline had said something like that, he recalled.
Annette poured the wine and they clinked glasses. The wine was astringent. It puckered his mouth slightly.
She apologized. “I like it, but my sister always finds it treats her that way. She prefers the Bordeaux.”
He hadn’t yet told her that he had seen Monique, and when he mentioned it now, a flicker of a shadow crossed her face, but she brightened again immediately.
“Monique works very hard with her students—the disabilities with hearing and reading, the children who read back to front. She teaches them music.”
“Dyslexique?”
“Yes. She is a very good teacher, always helpful. Her students adore her.”
“So she is like her sister—someone who helps.”
She laughed and turned aside. She cut two thick pieces from the baguette and handed one to him.
They were silent a moment. Then, averting her face, Annette said, “Monique told you, didn’t she?” She was staring at the waterfall. “I could tell that you knew. It is in your tone, and in the way you observe me.”
He was startled, embarrassed. He wanted to see her face, to see what this moment meant. But she kept her face turned away.
“She told me very little,” he said. “I didn’t want to ask you about it. If it’s too painful, don’t say anything.”
“Oh, I can tell a story!” She waved her hand and looked at him. “I can make it very dramatic. But it is so worthless.”
“I doubt that.”
They locked eyes. “You don’t need to hear it.”
“No, I don’t have to hear it.”
Dropping her eyes, she sliced a piece of cheese for him. The waterfall was loud, intrusive.
She said, “I don’t tell it. I had asked Odile not to speak of it to you when we went to see her, and she understood. It is of no use to anyone. You have no interest in this.” She sighed. “My life is so small.”
He set his bread and cheese on the cloth and placed his hands on her shoulders. He said, “No. Your life is not small. You are a heroine. You saved men’s lives. You were active when others were afraid. Your life is not small.”
He saw tears coming in her eyes, and she allowed him to hold her. For a moment, he saw them with a passing tourist’s eye: lovers beside a waterfall, entwined in a romantic embrace, exactly the sight one was supposed to see on a scenic trail by a waterfall somewhere in France.
45.
MARSHALL HELPED ANNETTE WITH HER EVENING CHORES—taking grain to the horses, shutting in the chickens. Birds were twittering and trembling in the vines on the wall, and the peacock was roosting in a small
tree. Annette fed the dog and cat.
“I should probably go find that hotel in Cognac,” he said, with a hesitation that left open a question for her.
“Do not go, please,” she said, touching his arm. “We must dine later. I have prepared some dishes. And I want to tell you what happened. Wait, please.”
She showed him where he could wash up, and he grabbed a clean shirt from his bag in the car. In the mirror above the sink his face was blank, he thought. He combed his hair and went to the terrace. She was still in the kitchen, and then she brought some cold Perrier and an open bottle of wine. She excused herself again to bring food from the kitchen, refusing his offer to help. The dog went with her. Marshall drank half a glass of Perrier, then sipped some of the wine. It had a metallic taste. He watched the cat washing her face. It was just after sunset, and the sky was still bright. A 727 was going over, a domestic flight, maybe from Bordeaux.
Annette returned with a small tray and sat down across from him. He shifted his chair so that he could see her clearly in the late light. She had changed into blue pants and a tight V-necked shirt. She seemed fresh and delicate, not like a country woman who had just hiked five miles. Bernard lay down on the tiles between them, his head on his paws.
“Am I a threat?” Marshall asked, regarding the dog.
“No, no. Bernard accepts you,” she said. “He approves.”
She leaned to stroke the dog. “Bernard knows the story I will tell you now. At least I think he does.”
Bernard groaned and stretched out on his side.
Annette spread some pâté on tiny pieces of toast and laid them on a plate between them. The table wobbled slightly, and Marshall got up to adjust it with a chunk of wood he had spied in the grass.
“So much happened,” she said, arranging her napkin on her lap. “I can’t repeat it all.”
“Don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” he said.
“But I do.” She absently folded her napkin and set it on the table.
The Girl in the Blue Beret Page 23