by Robb, Graham
One day that spring, in thousands of homes all over Paris, the wireless was unplugged and taken away, along with all the bicycles that were kept on the landing with padlocks on them because there were so many bicycle thieves about. Telephones were disconnected, and since they were not allowed to use a telephone box or to go into a café, the only way to ask relatives in the country to send more food was to use one of the letters on which the words were already printed: ‘The——-family is well’ ‘——-wounded——killed——in prison’ ‘——need food——money’, etc.–but then they weren’t allowed to buy stamps to put on the envelope. Sundays became quite boring because the families who were singled out in this way were not allowed to go to the park, the playground or the swimming pool, or even to the market or to any of the museums, and they couldn’t even visit relatives in hospital (though they still had to go to school). They couldn’t go to the theatre or the cinema, which meant that they missed seeing Charles Trenet sing ‘C’est la romance de Paris’.
It became quite hard to think of things to do, except read books, and even that became difficult. A boy called Georges who lived in the third arrondissement had to take all his library books back to the town hall. The librarian, whose name was Mlle Boucher, saw him come in with his books, and she said to him,
‘You like reading, don’t you?’
Georges nodded his head.
‘And I expect you’d like to go on reading, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Georges, ‘but I’m not allowed to now.’
Then she said to him in a whisper,
‘Come back this evening at half-past five and wait for me outside.’
At half-past five, Mlle Boucher wheeled her bicycle through the gates of the town hall and told Georges to get on the back. They went along the Rue de Bretagne and turned down the Rue de Turenne. Ten minutes later, they stopped in front of the Musée Carnavalet, which was where Mlle Boucher lived, because her father was the director of the museum. She took Georges inside and showed him the library and told him that he could come back whenever he wanted and read all the books he liked, and this is what he did until the day when he and his family were forced to leave Paris.
Georges knew that Mlle Boucher was doing him a special favour. He also knew that she was very brave, because when she took him on her bicycle, he was wearing his yellow star. At school, the teachers had told everyone that they were not to treat the children who had to wear the stars any differently, and most of their classmates felt sorry for them, except when they were children that no one had liked anyway. But there were also pictures pasted up on walls and printed in newspapers that were supposed to be pictures of children like himself, and he often looked in the mirror to see if he had the same horrid nose and silly ears as the people in the pictures.
Parents had to use their clothing coupons to buy the stars, and older sisters complained that the star, which was mustard-yellow, didn’t match any of the clothes that they had. Some of their neighbours stopped talking to them and even said rude things to them in public. One child’s aunt came home in tears, and when she took off her headscarf her head was covered in soap because the woman at the hairdresser whose job it was to rinse the customers’ hair had refused to wash it off. And then instead of having nothing nice to eat, they sometimes had nothing at all, because their mothers were only allowed to queue for food between three and four in the afternoon, by which time all the food had gone.
This was in the summer of 1942. For some people, it was the last summer they ever spent in Paris, and those who stayed behind sometimes wondered whether they were still living in the same city.
II
THAT JULY, two days after everyone had celebrated Bastille Day, some children found themselves in a part of the city where they had never been before, at least not on their own.
Nat stood on the street where all the green-and-white buses with what looked like friendly faces were lined up bumper to bumper. In front of him was a short street at the end of which was the Seine. Though he couldn’t see it, he knew it was the Seine because there were no houses, just empty space where the buildings would have been. And then he saw a seagull swerve lazily.
He clutched his coat about him like a thief, without stopping to button it, not because he was cold, but to hide his sweater. He could still feel his mother’s hand on his back where she had given him a shove, and he began to walk forwards, towards the Seine. At the end of the street, he turned right without noticing. This was the Quai de Grenelle, which was also the name of a Métro station.
The wind blew along the river in gusts and made his eyes feel sore and dry. He put one foot in front of the other and thought about going back inside to where all the others were. Then the wind brought down the rumble of rubber and metal and the elongated screech. He looked up and saw the green carriages heading out towards the seagull.–Le Métro aérien…It was called that as though, on that section of the line, it was a different kind of train altogether, as though it might leave the tracks with a sudden silence and run off into the sky.
The wooden steps went up from the middle of the street. The street was sheltered by the underside of the tracks like the roof of a basement. He began to climb into the cage of metalwork. He was still extremely thirsty and he could still smell the urine on his trousers. Across the road, a street-sweeper had stopped sweeping and was watching him climb the steps. At the top was a woman in a uniform with no expression on her face. She sat under the sign that said SORTIE and looked like the woman who opened cubicles in a public toilet, only more grubby. Two policemen came from under the sign marked PASSAGE INTERDIT. The woman was called the poinçonneuse because she punched a hole in the ticket, which he did not have, and his mother had not put any money in his pockets. He heard the sound of clanking chains and sliding metal that meant a train was coming.
THE WOMEN were shouting, ‘On a soif! On a soif! Nos enfants ont soif!’ They pushed away from the concrete wall, holding each other by the arm, bulging out into the street, staring at the eyes half-hidden by visors, each one picking out a pair of eyes like infantrymen advancing on an army. Behind them, inside the great closed space, the hum of humankind sweltering in the smell of shit and antiseptic. Then the cry went out, ‘Une épicerie ouverte!’
Some of the women broke away from the others and were clattering across the street. As they ran, they were digging in their pockets and shoulder-bags. They were thinking of bottles of water, calculating the weight and bulk of fruit or biscuits, or even a tin of Banania as a compromise if they could get some milk. The line of policemen adopted a waiting position: allow them to buy some water; keep the others close to the entrance between the concrete pillars, under the red letters on the dirty glazed arch: VEL’ D’HIV.
Anna was standing near the entrance with her mother. Now–as she had been doing since the day before yesterday–she relieved herself standing up with all her clothes on, because this sudden emergence into the open air was too good an opportunity to waste. Her hair had been combed as if she was about to go on an errand. She felt her mother thrust her sideways and then try to pull her back or try to get a better grip to push her away. She clutched at skirts and pushed against bottoms to let the women know she was there behind them, because they were stamping and going backwards and forwards.
Two policemen were standing by the buses. After she had walked past them, there was the street ahead of her, and the air rushed into her lungs and when one of the policemen called out to her to come back, she said, ‘I wasn’t in there. I only came to find out about my family.’
She did not look back, because the policemen might not believe her, and she did not run, which was obviously the temptation, because her clogs would come off, and she would have to stop to put them on again or leave them lying in the street.
MILLIONS OF HANDS had pressed against the bar every day and polished it until it was shiny, unlike everything else in the Métro. Nat walked through the barrier and crossed to the other platform to get away from
the woman in case she called him back. She had looked at him for several seconds, saying nothing, and then she had said, ‘Passez!’, but without looking any friendlier.
A train came and not many people got off. Nat did not get into the last carriage, which was where he was supposed to go. He lifted the metal handle and forced the doors apart, like Samson or a lion-tamer. He had to use both his hands, which made his coat come open. Once he was inside, he turned to pull the doors together, standing as close to them as he could, then he clutched his coat and sat down.
He saw the people who had got off the train racing backwards along the platform. Then black girders went by, and there were faces in the window staring back at him or just looking out of the window. He saw his own face and his eyes, which looked like dark holes. No one spoke in the Métro any more. The train sped up but not very much because the next station was not far away. The faces began to vanish, and there was the street just below, with the buses’ white roofs and gas tanks, and policemen standing in groups, then lines of trees and the wide river, where the buses couldn’t go. He saw the Eiffel Tower turn slowly and begin to walk away to the right.
A man stood up and went towards the door. Windows flew past–a balcony covered in plants, a big room with a chandelier and a table. The windows were close enough for Nat to climb into the room if the train had stopped. At first, when it reached the station, the train kept moving because he was not in the last carriage. Then it screeched to a stop, and he saw ‘PASSY’ on the wall.
This was the end of the Métro aérien. Daylight came from the river, but the roof blotted out the light from the sky. Soon, the train would go back underground. He said to himself, ‘Trocadéro, Boissière, Étoile’. He tried not to think too hard ‘Étoile’, which is what he was wearing on his sweater above his heart.
ANNA did not look back. When she saw the bridge and the red sign, she knew where she was going, and she knew how to use the Métro on her own. Then she did look back.
The man with the sweeping brush and the little sailboat on his cap was staring straight at her. He lowered his chin and made his head point across the street to where the Métro was. She kept her eye on him while she crossed the street to see if he would do anything else, but he just kept pointing with his head at the steps that went up into the Métro.
She still had the five-franc coin with the Maréchal’s face on it. She would be safer in the Métro if she did not get into the last carriage. She put the coin on the counter and the woman took it and gave her a ticket and four coins, which she put into her pocket. If anyone asked, she would say she was going shopping for her mother, though she didn’t know where she was going because there was no one left at home. But her mother would find her in the Métro. She went under the sign that said DIRECTION ÉTOILE, because that was where all the different lines came together. Her own station was on a line that went to É toile, but it was a long way away, on the other side of Paris.
UNDER THE GANTRIES, applause broke out and washed about for a while, then stopped. Beyond the galvanized steel lamps, where the words said RIZLA and PHOSCAO, there was just the faintest flickering of hands. Then a loudspeaker rasped out some names and other syllables, which quickly lost their force and joined the felted layers of dust and sound; whoever was speaking into the microphone evidently had no idea of the effect of his voice. The noise and dust were so dense that shouts and screams were either muffled or too much a part of everything else to be noticed. It was like the oceanic clamour of a railway-station concourse, composed of nothing but the shuffling of clothes, limbs being stretched, a gasp, something dropped on concrete. A woman banged her head on the floor for nearly a minute before a policeman came to knock her unconscious.
Some of them were lying on the steeply banked track, which was dangerous because it was at least eighty feet from there to the top of the stands, and people occasionally jumped off. Other families were still arranged in little encampments marked off by bags and coats, which they tried not to move when the latest influx began to filter through. Some had been found at home with the gas-pipe in their mouth. A woman in the fourteenth arrondissement had just finished throwing her children out of the window, and then herself. A young man had seen her do it, and they all died, though someone else said it had happened at Belleville, and by the time the woman jumped, firemen were holding the blanket to catch her.
In the buses, the window seats had all been taken by children, who wanted to see where they were going. In the tenth arrondissement, the policemen who knocked at Mme Abramzyk’s door found her holding her six-year-old son; they told her to get her things ready and they’d be back in an hour…But when she rushed down to the ground floor, saying thank you God for this great mercy, the concierge came out of her lodge, where she had the Maréchal in a frame on the sideboard with his country suit and his hunting dog, and bolted the door to the street.
They had all been slow to respond to the rumours, and almost no one had seen the leaflet sent out by the communists, which they only heard about later on. Someone had received a pneumatique, someone else a telephone call–because luckily they had not yet been disconnected. They had sat and discussed it the whole night: it would only be men, or it would only be immigrants; families with little children or with fathers who were prisoners of war would be left in peace. Someone’s father had been pulled off a train in the Métro by a complete stranger who said he was delighted to see him again after so many years and then told him on the platform, before getting back on the train, that he was a police agent and that he should not sleep at home that night.
Now, in the grimy colosseum that contained whole quartiers without any dividing walls, rumours caused sudden eddies and movements of people. In an inner courtyard somewhere behind the stands, bread was being thrown down from the windows of a workshop in the Rue du Docteur-Finlay where they made gears for Citroën cars, and the neighbours who had seen the children’s faces in the buses and smelled the rising stench had been going there all day with food.
Anna’s mother watched for these wild surges of the crowd and the drift of bodies towards the exits. Her daughter had escaped and might be standing in the street waiting for her. She had already spotted a boy slip out of the same exit and she hadn’t seen him since. The thought that she might miss her only chance was too much to bear. She picked her way through the bodies, watching the exits, and sometimes she went right up to a policeman, who must have a mother himself, but it was only when she gave in to her anger that she made an impression. The policeman almost screamed at her, ‘I’ll put you in solitary if you don’t get back in there!’–as if they had cells in the Vel’ d’Hiv. So she shouted back at him,
‘Let me go! What difference does it make to you, one victim more or less?’
The policeman shrugged his shoulders, and said, in a quieter voice, ‘Get back in there.’ Then he turned away, and she saw the cropped hair below his cap and his stiff shoulders, and he seemed to be finished with her, so she walked out into the street.
Some women were standing in a doorway. She went towards them, and when they realized she was going to talk to them, they seemed to shrink back into the wall. She said, ‘Let me in. I have to hide.’ One of the women, who seemed more frightened than she was, said, ‘No, no! Keep going. Don’t stay here.’
The wind wafted the smell of her own clothes into her nostrils, and it was only a matter of time, she thought, before she was dragged back inside, and her daughter would be lost. But then she saw in the gutter what looked like an old coat-sleeve lying at right angles to the kerb with something wrapped in it, and the water rushing out of the drain, and a sloppily dressed man with his City of Paris cap, coaxing the rubbishy water along with his broom. She walked up to him, and as she passed, said, ‘Follow me!’, which he did, and he kept following her until they reached the Métro.
At the foot of the steps, she looked round and thought she saw the man smile at her, and he raised his hand briefly as if to say goodbye and then went back to his sweeping.
Another bus was coming round the corner from the Seine, with suitcases piled high on the rear platform, and children’s faces pushed up against the windows.
THIS WAS SOMETHING that happened at É toile and nowhere else: there was only one line but two platforms. The doors were opened on one side to let everybody out, then the doors on the other side were opened for the people who were waiting. Anyone who left the train was separated from the other passengers by the width of the carriage. As he walked along the platform, Nat looked through the carriage windows and saw some German soldiers waiting to get on with their rifles and gas masks slung over their shoulders so that they could carry all their parcels and shopping, but there were no policemen, which was more important.
He walked to the end of the platform where the metal plate said TUNNEL INTERDIT AU PUBLIC–DANGER, then he walked through the barrier with all the other people. These days, the escalators never worked and the electric lights were always dim. He climbed the stairs as slowly as all the grown-ups around him. There was a pain in his stomach which reminded him that he had not had anything to eat, though he did not feel hungry.
At the top of the escalator, he stopped behind a pillar that someone had used as a urinal and, reaching inside his coat, he tugged at his sweater and pulled off the star, which he crumpled in his fist and put into his pocket. There were men and women everywhere, heading off into tunnels with the look of people who knew where they were going. He stood in front of the Métro map for quite a long time, following the coloured lines with his eye and, to make it look more convincing, he also studied the board that listed all the stations that were closed. On the map, he mostly followed the blue line that went from É toile to the top-right corner of Paris. He saw BELLEVILLE and COMBAT and PELLEPORT, and then he thought of his friend from school, Elbode, who did not have to wear a star and whose parents had always been very polite to him.