The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Annette lowered her head.

  “But soon we learned certain things.”

  She ticked off a list on her fingers.

  “We learned that my father died at Buchenwald on February 6, the very day the Russians had liberated my mother and me at Koenigsberg.

  “That the abbé, Father Jean, had died there too.

  “That Robert had survived Buchenwald and was in Paris.

  “Much later we learned that the aviateurs who had been arrested with us, as I had suspected, went to the stalag and were liberated at the end of the war.”

  She paused and looked into the air, as if trying to remember more. Robert. Buchenwald. The words sank into Marshall’s mind. After a moment she shook her head and went on.

  “Not long after we arrived, Monique came to the Lutetia to find us. We had managed to send a letter to her, carried to the embassy by a French officer who arrived in Poland when the war ended. For weeks, Monique had come by Métro from Saint-Mandé to meet the arrivals of the déportés. Our hope of seeing her had helped my mother survive in the hospital. When we saw her we could hardly speak. She had not only grown tall and elegant—now eleven!—but we could see the suffering on her sweet face, as if it had been continuously taut with tears and worry. Her embrace was so tender, as if she thought we might break. We were still extremely thin and weak, and she could not hide her shock.

  “Monique had been with our friends, the Mauriacs, and they had cared for her, and she had continued in school. The Mauriacs had managed to retain our apartment, and thus we were able to return to the same home where you were sheltered. The Germans had plundered only the paintings and some of the furniture.

  “When we walked into that apartment, my mother, for the first time in the year since our arrest, broke into tears. All her emotion of the year—her fear and worry—had gone into survival, into protecting me, keeping up my spirits, calculating means of survival, enduring the diverse hardships, hating our tormenters. She had never allowed her grief and sorrow to flow until now. My mother dropped to the floor, swooning with release but also with grief—for Papa.

  “For some time I had been mother to my mother, and now I found I had to be the mother still and to hold her and caress her and assure her. And I had to do the same with Monique, who must have been both overjoyed and frightened at the sight of us.

  “It wasn’t until some days later, when we had resettled into our old lives in this stunted way, that I permitted myself to let go. Or maybe I didn’t permit myself—it took hold of me and I had no choice. The grief was true, and I could no longer contain it. I cried and raged until I ached.”

  She stopped and sighed deeply. Marshall expected her to cry now, but she did not.

  “Marshall, I am so grateful that you will listen. When we returned to that forlorn apartment, where our ‘boys’ had hidden, where they had helped us with the daily affairs, they seemed like ghosts there. We kept waiting for Papa to return from his office, or for Robert to arrive at the door. There were vacancies in our home. Nothing could be quite right again.”

  She stood, went to a sideboard, and poured something from a bottle into two glasses. The room was warm and dark; only a small lamp burned. She gave Marshall a tiny glass of cognac. The brandy hit him like fire. She sat beside him again.

  “We wanted to see Robert, but he was slippery. He did not want to see us. We could not understand. He had been in the habit of calling my mother tante, a term of affection, but now he would not answer our calls. We were very anxious. We wanted for him to give us details of Papa. Monique kept advising us that perhaps we did not want to know. It was clear that she did not want to know. We realized that Monique had had to be strong while we were away—living daily with uncertainty and fear and no news at all. Maman and I, who had seen everything, thought we could not be shocked. But we became distressed for dear Monique and Robert.”

  She leaned lightly against Marshall. “Telling about coming home is for me as hard as telling what happened in the war.”

  “Do you want to save the rest for another time?”

  “No.” She smiled, sitting erect again and sipping her cognac. “If you live in Cognac, you must drink cognac. Or so they tell me. Is it well with you?”

  “It has an after-burn!”

  Bernard moved from his bed in the corner, circled in front of them, then threw himself down on the rug. Annette bent forward to pat his head. Then she resumed.

  “When we returned to Paris, it was an anticlimax. We had been taken away ten days before the liberation of the city. Paris was happy. It had celebrated! De Gaulle had marched down the Champs-Elysées to Notre Dame. Even though the war continued through the winter and spring, Paris was free of the dreadful Nazis. And now the war was truly over, everywhere. Most of the déportés had already returned some weeks before we arrived, and we felt that we had been passed by. It was as if the déportés—and the awful knowledge that was beginning to surface about what had really happened—had disrupted the way of life for everyone else. Paris didn’t want to know what we had been through. They did not want to hear about us. Since then, all my friends have been the déportés and those who were in the Résistance. There is a deep bond. We don’t have to speak of the deportation because we know. There is that bond of memory.

  “We had to resume our lives. We had very few resources, and it was two years before we received anything from the government. Maman returned to teaching, and she cared for Monique and me. She was strong again. Something in her was destroyed—do not misunderstand. She never overcame the loss of my father. But she went forward. Of course, what else was there to do?

  “As for me, I attended special classes for the déportés and the Jews who had been hidden. I passed the bac, then studied at the Sorbonne, and then I met Maurice! And here I am now.”

  She turned to Marshall and smiled.

  “There is not a day when I don’t rejoice,” she said. “It’s the small things that give me most pleasure. I can see a butterfly on the window and think I’m in heaven. And yet … I don’t know how to explain. I know I am never quite myself ever again. I am not her.” She gestured at a portrait on the far wall. “I am not the woman she would have been, if life had been different.”

  Marshall arose and crossed the room to study the portrait, a framed drawing.

  “It’s you,” he said. “That’s how I remember you. That’s how I see you now.”

  In the drawing, made with free-flowing charcoal lines, she was lovely and delicate—her twinkling eyes, the teeth he loved.

  She shook her head and stared at her hands, folded in her lap.

  IT SEEMED NATURAL that they would lie in each other’s arms that night. It was what they both wanted. They needed to be together. Physical comfort was what he had to offer her, not words. He sank into her, in her downy bed, alighting smoothly, rushing and then slowing, and she was affectionate and generous. For a long time afterward, they clasped each other tightly. They couldn’t get close enough. He had no sense of what came next.

  “It is warm with you,” she said.

  “I want to protect you.”

  “You are good to me.”

  “You are nice to hold.”

  “Just hold me.”

  49.

  WHEN MARSHALL AWOKE NEXT MORNING, SHE WAS NO LONGER beside him. It was late, past nine. The kitchen was cleared of last night’s dishes, and the cat was at the door. He found a box of pellets for the cat, a striped gray thing with a notched ear, and filled her dish on a shelf on the terrace. When Bernard greeted him with an elegant bow, Marshall talked to him like a friend. The day was calm and clear. The chickens were out, scratching in a patch of grass. A horse whinnied. Annette’s car was absent from its spot in the recess of a building in the courtyard. He heard a car pass on the street. A 727 flew over. The captain would have taken off from Bordeaux and was gaining altitude. Perhaps he was on his way to Berlin, or Düsseldorf.

  The aftereffects of the wine and cognac made Marshall feel fuzzy. H
is eyes were burning. He could not stop thinking of Annette curled up with her mother, her mother near death. He imagined lice-infested hair, rat-bitten skin, rags, bodies stacked in dirty, crowded beds. In the shower, he sobbed. He shaved with his new electric razor, but there was no mirror near the outlet.

  Hearing Annette’s car, he crossed the courtyard to close the gate behind her.

  She greeted him then with a smile and kisses.

  “I had to go early to the market,” she said, retrieving a large basket from the seat beside her. “I had to check for the peaches, and the freshest fish arrives on Tuesdays.”

  Her hair was feathery around her face, and she appeared well rested. He carried the basket inside for her, and she began unloading it on the worktable in the kitchen.

  “It was too early for the peaches,” she said. “But I found sweet cherries!”

  “Georgia peach,” he said. “In the States peaches grow in Georgia. A pretty girl in Georgia might be called a Georgia peach.”

  “That’s nice. Would I have been a peach if I were a girl in Georgia?”

  “Of course. You are always a peach, no matter where or when.”

  They were giddy.

  “ISN’T THE BREAD LOVELY? Do you want some bread?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Do you want butter?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “And confiture? I also have croissants, two kinds. Sit.”

  “Yes.”

  “You Americans like butter on your bread around the clock, but we have butter on the bread only at breakfast.”

  “I know. I’ve been to France a time or two.”

  “And I didn’t know you were here!”

  Her lively gaze shifted around the terrace—to the ivy-covered wall, to the stone steps where the cat was washing her face, then to Marshall’s face. The coffee she gave him was strong and satisfying. He drank it in small sips. He was enormously lucky—to be here, in this place, with her. He wanted to take care of her. What was a man for but to offer protection and security to a woman? He breathed deeply.

  50.

  THROUGHOUT THE DAY SHE CONTINUED THE TELLING. HER French was too fast for him, so she indulged him by speaking English. In the kitchen, in the chicken house, in the field with the horses, she spoke—insistently, passionately. Walking down the lane to the river, they guided each other, arms around each other’s waists. He was holding her in a half embrace even as she was launching a carrot at a horse or drying a bowl in the kitchen. He felt rooted in Annette’s courtyard. He was at home with her chickens, her horses, the exuberant yet patient dog.

  He followed her around, trailing in the wake of her story. She made elaborate dishes that required both precision and intuition. She seemed to do this automatically, as if cooking were only a background accompaniment to her voice. She whipped eggs for a quiche Lorraine. She pitted cherries for clafoutis. She minced parsley.

  They were in her garden, in bright sunlight. She was showing him how to deadhead a flower bed. Holding a handful of dead flowers, Annette stood beside a bank of zinnias, the palette of colors virtually jumping against the dull landscape of the work camp she was describing.

  “At Ravensbrück, we were digging potatoes. It seemed to me that the jardiniers were experimenting with some esoteric principles of ‘biodynamic’ gardening. I learned more about this later. At the time it was of little interest.”

  She laughed and flipped a dead flower into a bucket. She snipped some more flower heads and continued. “The Nazis wanted purity in their lives. They wanted pure food, pure art, pure blood. Hitler would not eat animals. That was the only good idea he had! Oh! Also he liked dogs. The Nazis used animal manure only in a certain way that they thought natural and compatible. In the garden, they set us to labor—to grow food for them, nothing for us. We did not know where we were or how much of eternity we would be there.”

  Letting the dead flowers fall, she grasped his arm and lowered her head.

  “What I hated most about the German soldiers and officers was the way they could be perfectly polite in one moment and coldly brutal in the next, as if that were the rule. They followed rules. Now you will be correct. Now you will be violent. The French love rules, but of course we mean the rule of civilization, not of barbarity. The Nazis behaved as if barbarity could follow rules, and that therefore it could be normal. That’s the difference. Or, that’s what I used to think, but …”

  She let go of his arm.

  “Marshall, I know I shouldn’t hate the Germans. But even now when I’m in the presence of someone German I feel a little cold shiver. I’m ashamed to say that.”

  “How can you feel ashamed after what you’ve been through?”

  “Think, Marshall. Their barbarity called forth our own savagery. There is atrocity everywhere. The blame is not just on Germany. It’s on all of us.”

  “I see.”

  “But I’m going on with opinions. It exhausts me—the weight of my opinions. My mother is telling me, urgently—she told me when I was in Saint Lô last week—that I must conquer my refusal; that I must assemble some scrapbooks and begin to visit the schools. People are beginning to do that—as Odile is doing. Maman says if I don’t go out to be a witness, the young people are never going to know how it was.”

  LATE IN THE AFTERNOON they rested indoors, in the bedroom. She closed the shutters, muffling the outdoor sounds. The workmen had returned to the courtyard to lay a stone walk between the house and the former carriage house, where she stowed her car. Their voices were unintelligible, punctuated by occasional curses or loud bursts of laughter. The room had large, ornate furnishings and portraits of ancestors, and fresh flowers.

  “I haven’t been in a French home since the war,” Marshall said, then remembered Iffy and Jim. He had forgotten all about them.

  “That armoire was in the Paris apartment when you were there,” she said, pointing to a somber, heavy piece of furniture opposite the bed.

  “It’s big enough to hide a couple of flyboys,” he said.

  “Indeed. That’s why it’s called an ‘homme debout.’ A man standing!”

  “I just realized why French doors are double doors,” he said, thumping his forehead. “To move the giant furniture.”

  She laughed. “I tell you horror stories, and I expect you to make me laugh.”

  “I do my best.”

  STILL ENCLOSED IN EACH OTHER, they lay on her soft, lavender-scented sheets. It was too warm, but he didn’t want to let her go, and she did not move to release him. Quietly, she resumed the telling, parceling out more from her store of turbulent memories.

  “There are some things that will keep repeating somewhere in my consciousness always, till my last breath. The throes of childbirth are like birds singing at dawn compared to the harshness of wearing broken shoes in winter as I lifted my ax again and again to work the ground. And now you arrive to me, like a ghost, stirring me until I could think I was eighteen years old again. Since that time I have never known misery. I have never felt discomfort on a train, or waiting a long time for a seat, or in a line. I am never bored. I never feel that a minor discomfort is insupportable. I know what I can bear.”

  “I’m amazed at what you had to bear.”

  “Maman had to protect me from the depravity. Oh, it was so horrible. What they did to her—No, I can’t visit that. It’s gone.”

  Annette threw her hands up to cover her face for a few moments. He thought she might be crying, and he pulled her to him, but then she resumed in a soft, low tone.

  “I cannot tell of the worst things. You will think it was all like that. The friendships with so many wonderful women—I don’t want to say that was the happiest time of my life, certainly not. But in a way it was the best time, the most important.”

  “Tell me what you mean—the best time.”

  “You had to have a best friend in order to survive. For me, it was my mother. But there were so many women willing to help. We helped each other to live. At s
ome point a person stops helping and thinks only of herself. But I knew women who never gave up their willingness to help. When I arrived at Koenigsberg, I had an ear infection. A girl who was a nurse stole some medicine from the infirmary and gave it to me. ‘Don’t say a word,’ she told me. She could have been shot for that simple kindness.” Annette paused. “And in fact she was shot, later, on the Death March.”

  “So with the friendships came loss.”

  “Yes. There were some very brave English girls at Koenigsberg with us. They were British agents who had parachuted into France to work with the Résistance. They were sent back to Ravensbrück early. We hoped they would be liberated, but we learned much later that soon after they arrived at Ravensbrück they were shot. I had been deported with those girls, and I had worked beside them at Koenigsberg, and the news of them made my heart so heavy.”

  She paused. “I apologize,” she said, squeezing his hand.

  “The idea of shooting a woman …” Marshall couldn’t finish the thought.

  “Of the two hundred and fifty Frenchwomen I was with, fifty-six of us returned to France.” Pausing, she took a deep breath.

  Her eyes focused on the homme debout.

  “There were moments of pleasure. In the evenings we talked, we shared our lives. We made poésie, songs. On Sundays we had prières. On Christmas a very nice Polish girl who was artiste made a pretty Christmas tree, using every little scrap to decorate it. The German directress, who was so cold and brutal, liked our tree. It brought a little smile to her face, but she wouldn’t admit it. Her eyes were blue and hard like metal. She was terrible, but she was a simple woman.