Wild Lavender

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘What does it mean?’ someone asked.

  There was a policeman standing nearby and a woman called out to him. He came over to the group and explained: ‘The police are to stay in the city to keep order and peace. We are not to leave under any circumstances.’

  I felt sorry for him. He was young—the right age for the army—and his voice trembled. Who could blame him for being nervous? What were the Germans likely to do to a Frenchman of military age?

  I wondered if I would have been wiser to continue south rather than coming back to Paris. It would have been safer in Pays de Sault, and I knew my family would be worried about me. There was no way I could send them a telegram, all the post offices were closed. But it felt right to still be in Paris and my mother had always encouraged me to follow my instincts. I was bearing witness to a colossal event, or at least I was holding the hand of my beloved city while she gasped in her death throes.

  It was the following day, June thirteenth, that I finally accepted there was no hope that we could resist the Germans. I went to the newspaper stand in Montparnasse early, but it was shut. The vendor had left the latest bulletin pasted to the door:

  Notice To the Residents of Paris Paris having been declared an OPEN CITY, the Military Governor urges the population to abstain from all hostile acts and counts on it to maintain the composure and dignity required of these circumstances.

  The Governor of Paris

  So the rumour Madame Goux had heard was now official. We weren’t going to blow up bridges, blockade the roads, ‘pour oil down the city walls’ so to speak. We were going to let the German army walk in. Was this some sort of military strategy? A trap for the Germans? Or was the government really handing over our beautiful city so it wouldn’t be fire-stormed like Rotterdam?

  When I returned to my apartment building, I found Madame Goux slumped over her desk, snoring. There was an empty bottle of wine next to her. A good bottle, something one of the apartment owners must have left behind. A trail of drool trickled down her chin and onto her copy of Edition Parisienne de Guerre. She was maintaining the appropriate ‘composure and dignity’ required of the circumstances. And if I had known where to find another bottle of Château d’Yquem, I would have joined her.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I opened my eyes at dawn the following morning, woken by the purr of a motorcar. The vehicle paused and idled under my window. Even though I had lived overlooking the busy Champs élysées for several years, there were few cars left in Paris at that time and no buses, so the unusual noise disturbed me. I glanced down the bed. Four pairs of eyes shone back at me. The cat, who I had named Chérie, was curled between my thighs. Princesse and Charlot had tucked themselves under my arms. Bruno was stretched out over my ankles. Each animal had at least one part of their body—chin, paw, stomach, rump—resting on me. When I stirred, they stirred too. We were a pack of wolves, ready to move when the dominant animal decided there was danger. I resisted the urge to squirm under the heat and sardine breath generated by so many furry bodies, and tried to guess what kind of vehicle it was. But the car moved off again and the sound faded into the distance.

  A few minutes later, Bruno growled. The smaller animals followed his lead, lifting their heads and pricking up their ears. I strained my own ears to listen. Chérie sprang up and leapt to the floor, her pupils wide and the fur on her spine and tail fluffed up. I could just make out a faint sound: a steady rumble. Clod! Clod! Clod! Clod! The noise grew louder and more menacing. I sat up. I knew what it was: boots pounding on pavement. Thousands of boots.

  We had been told to remain indoors for forty-eight hours after the Germans entered the city. Only no one had told us when we should expect them. I slid out from under the animals and rushed to the window, ripping open the curtains. At first all I could see were rows of French policemen lining the avenue, their batons drawn by their sides. Had I been mistaken? Was it the police I had heard? But the policemen weren’t moving and the sound was growing louder. I flung open my window and leaned out. My blood rushed to my feet. German tanks, four abreast, were grinding their way down the Champs élysées. Marching behind them, for as far as the eye could see, were columns of German soldiers.

  I shut my window and threw on a dress and sandals. Despite the warning to stay indoors, the sight was so terrifying that I couldn’t. I had to see this catastrophe for myself, because until I did, I didn’t think that I could believe it.

  Madame Goux must have had the same idea. She was coming out of her office as I reached the foyer, dressed from head to foot in black like a widow. Out on the Champs élysées, we found that other people were disobeying the order too. They had pale, grief-stricken faces and many of them were weeping. The policemen did not tell us to go back inside. Perhaps they were glad for our company. One policeman, standing to attention like the others, had tears rolling down his cheeks. I thought of the young police officer I had seen in Montparnasse. What an awful task these men had, to hand over the city and its people to the Germans.

  The first of the tanks roared past us, grey against the morning rays of June sunshine. An armoured car with two helmeted soldiers followed afterwards. The passenger smiled at me. I turned away but the woman in front of me was excited by the victory parade. ‘Look how smart the Germans’ uniforms are!’ she gushed. ‘Look how handsome they are! Like blond gods.’

  Madame Goux snapped at her, ‘And some of those blond gods have slaughtered French people!’

  The other bystanders glared at the woman, supporting Madame Goux’s words with their icy stares. The woman shrugged, but was wise enough to stay quiet for the rest of the spectacle. The worst part was that in voicing what she had, she underscored our humiliation. The German army did look smart. Their uniforms were neatly pressed and their boots shone; a contrast to our own soldiers when they had retreated through the city a few days before, dishevelled, wounded, gabbling with despair. Still, even as I stood there watching the parade, I believed that while the French army had lost Paris, they were powerful enough to stop the Germans going any further south. That belief was the only thing I had to keep me going.

  The Germans marched and paraded most of the day. In the late afternoon I walked to Montparnasse to see if I could find out more news about the progress of the war. I was sickened to see that the Dôme and the Rotonde were full of German soldiers. And, worse, that there were so many French citizens happy to share their tables and chat with the invaders as if they were some sort of tourist group in Paris for the day. Or perhaps the people were relieved that the German army was showing restraint. They were paying for their drinks, whatever pittance the franc was now worth against German currency, and didn’t seem to have the intention of embarking on a looting and raping spree.

  In the evening, Madame Goux and I listened to the radio, trying to find out what was happening in the south. But all the Paris radio stations had been taken over by French-speaking Germans, repeating the same message: the German army did not wish to harm the people of Paris. We had been deserted by our government and deceived by the Jews. The sooner France made peace with Germany, the sooner they could defeat the British, the real enemy.

  ‘They don’t intend to harm us?’ I said, switching the radio off. ‘They killed those children on the road. The eldest was barely seven years old.’

  The following morning, I found the dogs lined up by my front door. They had regained their strength and were itching to be taken for a walk. Madame Goux found Bruno’s lead in Monsieur Copeau’s apartment, but a search of Monsieur Nitelet’s cupboards and drawers was in vain and I didn’t have any pieces of rope or belts long enough to use as leads.

  ‘Do you think I’ll find a pet shop open?’ I asked Madame Goux. ‘Or a hardware store?’

  ‘Try along the Rue de Rivoli,’ she suggested, sarcastically. ‘All the storekeepers there seem to be putting out their welcome mats for the Germans.’

  I took Bruno with me to find leads for Princesse and Charlot. He was a formidable creature; even on al
l fours he was as tall as my waist.

  The Germans had set up their headquarters in the Hôtel Crillon, on the Place de la Concorde, so I walked the long way, in the direction of the Arc de Triomphe. When I caught sight of the monument, my knees buckled under me. A swastika flag hung over it, big enough for the whole city to notice. It shouted the message I didn’t want to hear: Paris now belonged to the Germans.

  I turned down a side street and headed towards the Seine. Plastered on the wall of a building was a poster of a German soldier. He was holding a small boy in his arms while two girls looked up at him adoringly. The caption read: ‘Abandoned people: have confidence in the German soldier’.

  I thought about the radio broadcasts Madame Goux and I had listened to the previous night. This war will be fought in the mind, I told myself. We were abandoned people, forsaken by our army and government. But I had no confidence in German soldiers.

  Two days later, Madame Goux knocked on my door. ‘Marshal Pétain is going to speak on the radio tonight,’ she told me.

  Our government had fled to Bordeaux and the latest news we had heard was that Marshal Philippe Pétain, France’s war hero of Verdun, had replaced Paul Reynauld as premier. The news had been greeted with joy but I wondered what an eighty-four-year-old man could do for France, apart from rallying the people. As it turned out, I was right. But what Marshal Pétain tried to get us to rally to was something that I could not accept.

  Through the static we listened to Pétain’s shaky voice: ‘With a heavy heart I tell you that the fighting must cease.’ He was intending to call an armistice, to make peace with the Germans.

  Madame Goux and I stared at each other, unable to speak. France had been defeated in a few weeks? Pétain was asking us to make the best of things and cooperate with the Germans?

  ‘They handed Paris over like a gift and now they will do the same with the rest of France,’ spat Madame Goux.

  ‘I don’t understand how he can—’

  ‘Because he is a right-wing fascist himself, that’s how,’ she said, clenching her fists. ‘I will not collaborate with the Germans. I will not cooperate with those people.’

  Was this the same woman who had refused to spread sand in the roof? There was fire in her eyes now.

  It wasn’t until the following morning that the full impact of Pétain’s message hit me. France was now a Nazi satellite. All our industrial strength and resources, including ourselves, were available to the enemy. The Germans were right when they called us abandoned people. We had been abandoned, but I was not going to collaborate with a regime that murdered children and stripped people of civil rights because they were Jewish. I thought of Minot. He was probably safe at the farm for a while, and only a few hours from Marseilles by train if he needed to escape. But what about Odette, Monsieur Etienne and their families? I hoped they would go to Pays de Sault. It didn’t matter that Pétain had said he offered himself to France in order to lessen her suffering. The way he had announced France’s defeat seemed suspiciously hasty. If Pétain was a fascist then the Jewish people couldn’t expect protection from him.

  I had managed to buy leads for Princesse and Charlot and decided to take all three dogs for a walk. On that glorious summer day it seemed that Madame Goux and I were the only people who hated the German army. Paris, it appeared, had resigned itself to defeat and was now intending to ‘get on with it’. After all, as I heard one waiter tell another when I passed by a café, ‘The Germans are not so bad. Perhaps what we have been hearing about the Nazis were only lies from our own government.’

  Certainly the soldiers I saw about the city were not what I had been expecting. They were fresh-faced and apple-cheeked. They smiled at storekeepers and young women, but did not fraternise. They took pictures of each other outside monuments and bought French perfumes and scarves to send home to their mothers. They gave up their seats to the elderly and women on the métro and lined up like everyone else for tickets to the Louvre. They were endearing themselves to the Parisians with their good manners.

  ‘I saw them salute the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,’ Madame Goux confided in me when I returned home. We both agreed that these boys did not seem capable of gunning down children or forcing old Jewish women to drink from puddles.

  ‘It’s not right,’ I said. ‘I still feel something evil; a storm brewing in the distance.’

  ‘When evil comes,’ said Madame Goux prophetically, ‘it usually comes on the wings of innocents.’

  The next week passed like a strange dream. I was over my illness but was listless. Getting out of bed became such a struggle that for several days I stayed in it. Madame Goux lapsed into her own kind of depression, smoking and playing solitaire in her office for most of the day. The only task that kept her going was making sure that the apartment building looked occupied. She watered the flowers in the planters, opened and closed curtains at different times of the day and also asked me to help lug some of the furniture from Monsieur Copeau’s apartment into Monsieur Nitelet’s apartment upstairs.

  ‘I don’t want the Boche to think that they can shack up here,’ she explained. It was true that the German high command was requisitioning the finest hotels and apartment buildings for its personal use.

  Many of the Parisians who had fled started to return. Shutters rolled up again on shops. There was food at the markets, theatres issued programs and banks recommenced business with limited trading hours. Some of those who returned were industrialists, but most were small business owners, many of them Jewish. They relied on Paris for their livelihood.

  It seemed as though the Germans had been planning the takeover of Paris for years. Everything moved like clockwork. On the heels of the army came the civil servants. I received notification from the Propagandastaffel that I was to present myself at the office as soon as possible and register with them. All French entertainers would have their songs vetted and their backgrounds checked before they could work.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I muttered. I rolled the letter into a cone and used it scoop out Chérie’s sand tray.

  The stream of refugee traffic returning to Paris from the south made me worry about Monsieur Etienne and Odette. I prayed that they would stay away from the city for their own good. Our telephone line had been cut for some reason, so I decided to go to Monsieur Etienne’s office myself. There were no taxis available to the French public so I caught the métro to the Left Bank, something I hadn’t done in years. The first carriage I got into was full of German soldiers, so I changed to another car at the next stop. But at the station after that, more German soldiers poured onto the train. I resigned myself to having to travel with the enemy. I sensed someone staring at me and glanced across the aisle to see two German officers diagonally opposite. They were looking in my direction and smiling. I had no intention of flirting with them and looked for something with which to seem occupied. I couldn’t stare out the window as the line was underground. There was a folded newssheet tucked into the side of the seat. I pulled it out and pretended to read it. A slip of paper floated from the page onto my lap. My eye fell to the handwritten words:

  To the people of Paris: Resist the Germans!

  I quickly hid the note back in the fold of the newssheet so no one could see what I was reading. My eyes scanned the words. It was a transcription of a speech given by Charles de Gaulle over a week ago:

  Is the last word said? Has all hope gone? Is the defeat definitive? No. Believe me, I tell you that nothing is lost for France.

  I glanced up; one of the German officers was still looking in my direction. He whispered something to his companion. I tried to keep my face as neutral as possible while I read the rest of the message. Colonel Charles de Gaulle, now General de Gaulle, had been one of the critics regarding France’s lack of preparedness for a war. It seemed that somehow he had escaped to London and was calling on all French soldiers who were in Britain, or who could make their way there, to contact him.

  The flame of French resistance must not be
quenched and will not be quenched.

  Tears welled in my eyes. My chin trembled. We had not been forgotten. There was a leader, someone who still believed in France. Resist? Of course I would resist, and with my last breath! But how? How would I find these people who still wanted to fight for France?

  I got out of the métro at Solférino, so buoyant with joy that I ran up the stairs. We have not been forgotten, I told myself. Nothing is lost for France.

  ‘Mademoiselle Fleurier!’ a man’s voice called out. I stopped, uncertain if I had heard my name or not. The accent was German. I turned around. Standing behind me were the two officers who had been sitting near me on the train. They were holding up a camera.

  ‘Please,’ said the taller of the two men, ‘we would like a photograph with the famous Mademoiselle Fleurier.’

  Of course, I cursed, the Germans would know who I was. I had refused to perform in Berlin after I had heard the stories about the treatment of Jewish people from Renoir and Count Kessler, but the Germans would have known me from my films and my records.

  A crowd of people gathered around, keen to see what was going on. The officer repeated his request. ‘Please, Mademoiselle Fleurier. A picture with you.’

  I did not want to have my picture taken with German soldiers. My personal feelings aside, what if it appeared in one of the propaganda newspapers? Simone Fleurier welcomes Officer Berlekamp and Officer Pätz to Paris. I used the Parisian approach and pretended that I couldn’t understand the question, although the officer spoke reasonable French. Unfortunately, a woman in the crowd decided that she would be helpful. ‘They want to have their picture taken with you,’ she said.