Wild Lavender

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘Should we go by train?’ I asked Minot. ‘Or you and Madame Ibert can go by train and I will follow after you?’

  Minot insisted that we all go together by car in case we needed a vehicle once we got to the farm. We decided to continue our hunt for petrol a while longer.

  Minot left to run some errands and see off friends. Madame Ibert and I had just sat down to lunch when we heard the hum of planes, followed a few minutes later by the howl of air-raid sirens. We ran to the window and stared up at the sky. A swarm of black dots swept overhead.

  ‘We should go to the cellar,’ I told her, remembering what my reporter friend had said about Parisians standing by their windows during air raids.

  We walked calmly down the stairs to the cellar. The situation was too surreal for panic. Obviously everyone in the building shared that feeling because the only other person in the cellar was Madame Goux. She was peeling potatoes, dropping the skins into a bucket. I had a feeling this was her regular spot for peeling potatoes—it saved her lugging them up the stairs—and she had not fled to the cellar for safety.

  There was a rattle of anti-aircraft fire. Madame Ibert and I cringed.

  ‘They are just trying to scare you,’ Madame Goux huffed. She said ‘you’ as if Madame Ibert and I were a different race of people.

  ‘There were enough of them to do that,’ I said, remembering the black shapes in the sky.

  Madame Goux sneered at me. ‘Do you hear bombs?’

  I had to admit that the only things I could hear at that moment were the scrape of her knife and Monsieur Copeau playing ‘Aux îles Hawaï’ on his gramophone at full volume. Obviously the air raid was not going to interrupt his listening pleasure.

  But we were not so stupid to have taken precautions. When the sirens sounded again to signal that the raid was over, we found a badly shaken Minot waiting for us in the apartment.

  ‘A thousand bombs,’ he said. ‘That is the estimate. They hit the Renault and Citroën factories. And a hospital. There might be more than a thousand people dead.’

  ‘A hospital!’ I cried, exchanging a disgusted glance with Madame Ibert.

  ‘That target may not have been intentional,’ said Minot.

  ‘We haven’t reached our petrol mark,’ said Madame Ibert, ‘but may I suggest we leave now?’

  I had no argument to give. We had all agreed that we would leave Paris when we were sure it was going to be attacked, and now it seemed that deadline had come.

  Minot fetched the car from the garage while Madame Ibert and I carried our supplies and suitcases downstairs. We were relieved that Madame Goux was not at her desk to interfere. I left her a note to say that I was going to visit my family for a few days, and that my apartment was locked and under no circumstances was it to be used by unauthorised persons—by which I meant the Germans. Of course, such an instruction was useless. Would an invading army baulk at breaking into an apartment? Besides, if they were going to drop a thousand bombs at a time, perhaps there wouldn’t even be an apartment to return to.

  Although I had been preparing for war for almost two years, I had lost my advantage by departing Paris on the same day that half the city also decided to leave. The streets were blocked with overpacked cars, as well as coffee vendors’ carts, taxis, bakers’ trucks, horse carriages and hay wagons.

  ‘Look at this traffic,’ Minot hissed under his breath. ‘We are going to use up our petrol before we even get to the Orléans gate.’

  It was hot in the car. My hands dripped sweat onto the wheel. But inside I was as cold as a grave. I stared at the sandbagging around Cleopatra’s Needle on the Place de la Concorde. Would the familiar monuments still be here when I returned? If I returned.

  Why are you leaving?

  I wiped my hand across my forehead and tried to push the thought out of my mind. It persisted. I reasoned with it: because I have to get Minot and Madame Ibert to safety.

  Yes, but you? Why are you leaving?

  My original plan had been to get Odette and her family out of France. It was also true that I wanted to help Minot and Madame Ibert. But the question of why I too was leaving started to bother me. I went over my reasons: because the Germans were known for their cruelty in the Great War; because of the stories my father had told me of German soldiers bayoneting babies and raping women and girls.

  The brightest light in the City of Lights.

  I clutched the wheel. That was not a title I had bestowed on myself, the way Jacques Noir had described himself as ‘the most adored comedian in the whole of Paris’. It was an expression the French public had given me. And now, as Paris was facing her darkest hour, ‘the brightest light’ was leaving.

  We didn’t get out of Paris and onto Route National Six until early evening. The highway south was crowded, but at least we were all heading in the same direction. At sunset we passed a church whose yard contained rows of freshly dug graves. We averted our eyes.

  We drove through the night, Minot and I taking turns at the wheel. When I awoke at dawn, I saw fields. ‘Are we nearly there?’ I asked Minot, yawning.

  ‘Are you joking?’ he asked. ‘We are barely a third of the way.’

  The sky was clear and the air was already hot. Madame Ibert made breakfast, cutting up bread on a board on her lap. In front of us was a motor truck with a dozen young children in it, along with a middle-aged woman and a teenage girl.

  ‘I didn’t see them earlier,’ I said.

  ‘We must have caught up with them some time during the night,’ Minot said. ‘The number plate is Belgian.’

  ‘They can’t all be that woman’s children,’ I said, looking at the little heads bobbing up and down. Some were dark, some were blonde, some red-haired. The children ranged in age from about four to seven years old and their weary faces pinched my heart.

  ‘They might be evacuees from a school,’ suggested Madame Ibert.

  ‘Do we still have that bag of peaches,’ I asked.

  She reached under her feet. ‘There is enough for one each,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Minot. ‘What are we going to eat if you and Mademoiselle Fleurier keep giving our food away?’

  Madame Ibert handed me the bag, along with two loaves of bread, a block of cheese, a packet of chocolate and a bunch of grapes.

  ‘We shall have more than enough to eat when we get to the farm,’ I said. ‘Those children may not have had anything for days.’

  We weren’t going fast enough for Minot to have to stop for me. I slipped out of the Peugeot and ran through the other cars and bicycles towards the motor truck.

  The woman’s face lit up when she saw me. She reached over the side to take my offerings. ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ she said, tears filling her eyes.

  I asked if she was the childrens’ teacher, and she said that she was. They had fled as the German army razed their town.

  ‘Good luck, Madame,’ I said.

  ‘God bless you,’ she called after me as I ran back to our car.

  We continued along the highway at a crawl, passing a farmer selling water at two francs a cup and another selling petrol at a price that was inflated, even for war time.

  ‘I guess there will always be someone ready to exploit a situation,’ Madame Ibert muttered.

  For the next hour we drove through open fields. Minot amused us with tales from behind the scenes at the Adriana, including gossip about the Paris stars, and I tried to lighten the atmosphere by singing a couple of numbers from my last show. I was crooning the theme from ‘Les Femmes’ when a blood-chilling wail cut through the sky.

  ‘Merde!’ said Minot, peering up through the windscreen. ‘What is that?’

  The traffic stopped ahead of us. People leapt from their cars or dropped their bicycles and fled across the field towards a grove of trees. Those with carts dived under them.

  The schoolteacher and her assistant jumped from the truck, pulling the children down after them. The driver rushed out of the cabin to help. I stepped from our car.
A Dutch man in the field turned and screamed out ‘Stukas! Stukas!’ for the benefit of the French people who didn’t understand what was going on and were looking at each other. Then I saw them: two German planes heading towards us.

  But they were military planes, looking for military targets. They wouldn’t fire on unarmed refugees. The planes lowered altitude. My heart cramped in my chest. Minot and Madame Ibert dropped to the floor of the car. ‘Duck!’ screamed Minot. But my eyes were fixed on the children trying to make their way to the trees, pushed and urged on by the teacher and her assistant. The driver was running with two toddlers under each arm.

  ‘No!’ I screamed.

  There was a rattling sound like stones hitting the road. Dirt jumped up in puffs. The little bodies shook and dropped to the ground. The teacher froze, jerking to the left and the right, trying to shield a girl from the bullets before she and the child toppled face down. The assistant fell a moment later. The driver was still running ahead, weighed down by the children he carried. A man ran out from the trees towards them and grabbed one of the children. They had almost made it under cover when one of the planes turned back. It cut all four of them down in a hail of bullets before regaining height and disappearing into the sky on the tail of its mate.

  My legs would only carry me as far as the edge of the road. Nobody else moved, terrified that the planes might come back. I stared at the huddle of bleeding bodies in the grass. At that low altitude, the pilots would have known their targets were children. They had hunted them for sport.

  ‘Those bastards!’ screamed Minot, running up beside me and shaking his hands in the air. ‘Those child-killing bastards!’

  The people who had fled to the trees ran back across the field. They rushed towards the bodies but it was clear from their solemn faces that there were no survivors. A woman fell to her knees and wailed over the body of the man who had gone to the aid of the driver. There was a discussion among the survivors; a few minutes later three men returned to their vehicles and took out spades. It seemed there was no way these bodies could be taken to a churchyard, they would have to be buried where they had fallen. A woman asked if there was a priest among the refugees and the message was passed down the line of cars. A cyclist rode ahead, calling out the request. A man in a priest’s robe got out of a car and headed back towards the scene of the killing.

  About twenty people remained behind to help bury the children and their guardians. The rest of the crowd returned to their vehicles. There was nothing for them to do but move on. From the conversation of two women who walked past me, I realised it was not the first time German pilots had fired on refugees. Now I understood why so many of the cars I had seen passing through Paris had mattresses tied to their roofs.

  ‘Come on, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ said Madame Ibert, slipping her arm around my waist. ‘We had best move on. There is nothing we can do here.’

  I thought of the teacher’s eyes when I had handed her the food. Who was that woman who had given her life for children who were not her own? Her assistant too, a young girl, so much younger than me, who had sacrificed herself? The driver whose face I never saw? I wanted to cry for the waste of innocent souls in the face of evil, but no sound came out. I retched but there wasn’t enough food in my stomach to bring anything up.

  Madame Ibert rubbed my back.

  ‘Do you know how to drive?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  I straightened up. ‘Minot has a map to the farm. Can you share the driving with him?’

  She nodded. ‘You rest in the back. I can drive,’ she said, turning towards the car.

  I grabbed her arm. ‘I mean, can you help Minot get to Sault? I am going back.’

  She held my gaze.

  ‘There is something I have to do,’ I told her.

  Minot, who had been listening to our conversation, came up behind us. ‘Mademoiselle Fleurier, you are in shock. You are upset. Calm down. There’s nothing you can do now.’

  But Madame Ibert seemed to understand. She must have seen it in my eyes. The murder of those children had broken open a seed inside me, and it was beginning to grow. She reached into the car and pulled out a bottle of water and some food and put them in a straw bag which she handed to me. ‘It will take you at least a day to walk back,’ she said, slipping an army knife from her pocket into the bag. ‘And it might be dangerous.’

  Minot glanced from Madame Ibert to me, shaking his head. The ring of spades hitting dry earth broke the silence. I shut my eyes against the sound. When I opened them again, Minot was holding my hand. ‘Send us word as soon as you can. I fear for you, but I see I won’t change your mind.’

  I watched Minot and Madame Ibert get back in the car and start up the motor. Then I turned away from them and began walking back along the road, in the opposite direction to the traffic. I couldn’t have said what I intended to do once I got back to Paris. All I had was my shaky courage and the conviction that I could not run from this dark force that had swamped Germany and was now falling over France. Until my last breath, I was not going to give in to evil. I was going to fight.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It took me three days to return to Paris. I spent one night in a field huddled under a tree with the knife Madame Ibert had given me at my side. The other night I slept in a barn. Every so often I would stop someone on the road to warn them about the German strafing. One man on a bicycle looked at me with unbelieving eyes but promised to pass on the message. No one recognised me. In my ragged stockings and crumpled dress, my hair stiff with dust, I bore little resemblance to the glowing figure on the posters for the Adriana and the Casino de Paris. I was so tired, thirsty and hungry that I saw spots before my eyes. On the third morning, I managed to hitch a ride with a Red Cross ambulance, the only vehicle going in the opposite direction to the traffic.

  The American driver handed me a canteen, her eyes flitting across my dusty, sweat-smeared face. She sensed my disorientation and said, ‘Finish it. I’ve got more water in the back and you’re dehydrated. Where are you going? Paris?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’m driving through there to get supplies,’ she said. ‘The police estimate there’s less than a third of the population left. Two million have fled.’

  We didn’t share much more conversation after that. She probably assumed I was going to Paris to collect a child or a parent. Every so often I would glance at her face. Her piercing blue eyes never left the road. Her jaw was set as if she was steeling herself for the grim and dangerous task that awaited her. She knows where she is going, I thought. But what was it that I was intending to do?

  The City of Lights was pitch black when we drove through Porte d’Orléans. There were no streetlights and the windows were blacked out. The driver dropped me near the Arc de Triomphe. It was the first time I had seen the roundabout without traffic. Some policemen standing near one of the columns were the only living beings around. I offered to buy the driver dinner if there was anything open, but she shook her head. ‘I must get my supplies and head north. There’s no time to lose.’

  I thanked her for the ride, then on impulse asked, ‘Why are you here? You are American. Your country is neutral.’

  Her face was invisible in the gloom but the whites of her eyes caught glints of moonlight. ‘I’ve had a good time in your country, Mademoiselle. The time of my life. It would be wrong to leave France now that she is suffering.’

  I thanked her again and made my way down the deserted Champs élysées. The shutters on the apartment buildings were closed and the grilles were down on the shops and galleries. Any window without shutters was criss-crossed with tape and blocked with black curtains. The ghostly glimmer of the moon was the only light and, apart from the muted barking of dogs from inside the buildings, there was no sound. Had everybody gone? I thought of the American woman driving through the night to pick up mangled soldiers. A foreigner was prepared to fight. Why weren’t we? Where was our will?

  My apartment building
was as gloomy and desolate-looking as the others in the street. I rang the bell although I held little hope that the concierge would be there. There was no light coming from her office or apartment. My feet were covered in blisters and I loathed the thought of walking all the way back to the Arc de Triomphe to ask one of the policemen to break in for me. I stared up at my apartment windows as if I was expecting Paulette to open one of them and call out a greeting to me. I ran my fingers through my tangled hair, searching for a pin. The next moment, cold metal poked into my throat. I caught a whiff of sulphur and something acrid, but after that I didn’t dare breathe. The gun barrel pressed against my skin.

  ‘Who are you?’

  I recognised the voice of the concierge. I couldn’t look at her because she had my head forced up with the gun and I was too scared to move.

  ‘Madame Goux.’ My voice was choked. ‘It’s me. Simone Fleurier.’ This was not Paris. This was Chicago.

  Madame Goux lessened the pressure then slowly removed the gun from my throat. I lowered my gaze. The barrel was still pointing at me, Madame Goux’s finger dancing around the trigger. She squinted, trying to see who I was in the dark. Something must have registered because a few moments later she dropped the gun to her side.

  ‘Mon Dieu!’ she said, pushing me into the building and locking the door behind us. ‘What happened to you?’

  I told her about my journey, not even thinking to ask her why she was still in the building or how she had got the gun. But I stopped short when she switched on a lamp. Her skin sagged under her eyes and her expression was listless. She had never been a genial figure at the best of times, and the tenants had often joked about the dour-faced way she greeted people, but she was much more haggard than usual.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I asked her in return.

  She glared at me then looked away. ‘The Boche didn’t just bomb military targets. They hit houses in the southwest of the city. My younger sister and her family are dead.’