Wild Lavender

by Belinda Alexandra

  I watched him walk back down the street and disappear into the night.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The winter of 1940 was the coldest I had known in years. The Germans weren’t willing to use their transport to bring coal to Paris, so our apartments went unheated, although the charcoal braziers in the establishments they frequented were always burning. Madame Ibert and I did our best to keep the men we hid warm. While André supplied us with blankets and overcoats, we knitted the men socks and gloves from the crude wool that was available. But food was still a problem. Even on the black market it was becoming scarce. Madame Ibert and I tried to put together soups, but some days the best we could do was chicken stock and water. I was glad that I didn’t have the dogs with me. Kira ate half a can of sardines a day and spent the rest of her time curled in a lined hatbox in my wardrobe; her version of hibernation. The rest of us usually went to bed straight after the evening meal. It was the only way we could stay warm.

  ‘We are doing better than a lot of other people,’ said Madame Goux, coming in from the cold one day, four withered carrots in her string bag. ‘People are burning their furniture and lining their clothes with newspaper.’

  ‘It’s still not as cold as Scotland,’ said one of the men in our care.

  I laughed, glad that he had kept his sense of humour. With the tensions of war, crowded conditions, the cold and the hunger, tempers were always in danger of getting out of hand.

  On one occasion, Roger was up from the south for a dangerous mission. A ship’s captain had agreed to secrete twenty men on board his vessel bound for Portugal. We had exactly twenty men in our care at that time, and the only way to meet the ship’s departure time was to take them down south together. Transporting twenty men, none of whom spoke French, with only me, Madame Ibert and Roger to accompany them was risky enough, but added to the danger was the reason why we were looking after so many men in the first place. Four safe houses had been exposed by a double agent and the Resistants had been tortured with spikes driven through their hands before being shot. After a week of living in tense conditions, our attempt to take the men south in one group was aborted when we arrived at the station and found that pictures of some of them had been posted on the notice boards with rewards for their capture. The ship would have to go without them.

  Having to return to a crowded apartment and wait until we could get new papers for them and, with the help of the Adriana’s wardrobe assistant, change their appearances, was too much for some of the men. Fights started over petty things like someone spending too long in the toilet or snoring. Two men got into a punch-up over a card game. Some of them began to question Roger’s leadership.

  ‘If I lose their trust and respect, Simone, we may as well lie down and give ourselves up to the Germans,’ he said. Roger, I had discovered, was the kind of person who thought big. ‘Impossible’ wasn’t a word he associated with easily. So it was unusual to see him so down in spirit. He was facing a daunting task. I had seen the signs of exhaustion among the men even before we had set off for the journey south. Their postures gave it away: hunched forward, gazing at the floor, arms crossed over chests as if they were trying to stop their hearts bursting out. I thought of the stories my father had told me of the men who became shell-shocked in the trenches: trembling, whimpering, they walked straight into the enemy fire. The certainty of death was preferable to the constant waiting for it.

  ‘It is battle fatigue,’ I told him. ‘They might be trained soldiers but it doesn’t mean they don’t feel it.’

  Roger nodded. ‘I sense they are ready to give up,’ he said.

  We lapsed into silence for a few moments, both of us contemplating the situation. My mind drifted to André. I had tried to be strong when our relationship fell apart but everything came down on top of me in the end.

  ‘People can’t live under pressure for ever; something always cracks,’ I observed.

  ‘You and I have to be careful because we endure it too well.’

  I understood what Roger meant. The adrenaline rush we felt getting past the German controls was useful for keeping us alert to danger. But we had done it so often now there was a chance of becoming desensitised and making foolish mistakes.

  ‘Do you think that is what is happening now?’ I asked him. ‘That we are taking too big a risk in trying to get all those men south?’

  Roger shook his head. He looked genuinely lost. ‘I don’t know, Simone. I’m starting to doubt myself.’

  I leant back against the wall and caught sight of Kira sitting in the doorway, licking her paws. For some reason she reminded me of the ‘good luck’ cat the stooge at the Ziegfeld Theatre had made me to calm my nerves before the show. Suddenly the entertainer in me sprang to life.

  ‘I have an idea,’ I told Roger. ‘Help me carry my gramophone upstairs.’

  Roger carted the gramophone to Monsieur Nitelet’s apartment, where the men were staying, while I followed with an armful of records. After we had set the gramophone down on a chair, Roger put on a tango record while I invited the men who knew the dance to take turns in partnering me. At first it was difficult to get anyone to join me, but after some cajoling I discovered two very good tango dancers among the men. One of them was so flamboyant with his dips and turns that it didn’t take long before we captured the interest of everybody. I arranged the men into groups and gave them a lesson before telling them to partner each other.

  ‘We’re not pansies,’ objected a New Zealander.

  ‘The Argentine tango was originally danced between men,’ I told him, ‘in the days of imported labour when there was a shortage of women.’

  Despite their initial protests, the men soon got into the spirit and danced with each other. Whether they were hamming it up or trying to master the dance with the seriousness they applied to military missions, I could see how much they were enjoying themselves. The New Zealander teamed up with an Australian, pointing his nose in the air and wiggling his hips. ‘This should be nothing new for you, mate,’ the Australian ribbed him. ‘You should be pretty used to doing it with sheep.’

  Their laughter made me chuckle too, and I realised that it had been months since I had laughed so easily.

  ‘May I?’ asked Roger, holding out his hand to me.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, blushing like a teenage girl.

  Roger was one of the most confident men I had ever met when it came to planning missions, yet he always seemed a little reserved around me. I thought he might be too shy to hold me but when he clasped me in his arms it was with such a passionate touch that my pulse quickened. He was an excellent dancer with an assured lead. Even more surprising, he began singing along with the Spanish voice on the gramophone in a tone that was beautifully melodious.

  You’ll see in the fire

  All that is a lie

  And all that is true

  Let us dance this tango

  So when I’m far away

  I will be able to see you.

  Rivarola had told me that when I danced the tango I should imagine myself as a sleek cat—beautiful, proud and graceful. I had never felt like that with Rivarola. But that was how I felt with Roger.

  ‘You’re not an ordinary woman, are you, Simone Fleurier?’ Roger whispered in my ear. ‘You’re not only brave, talented and beautiful but you’re smart as well. Things weren’t going at all well but you’ve lifted everyone’s spirits.’

  The atmosphere in the room had certainly changed. The men were smiling and slapping each other’s backs. I sensed that their improved spirits and comradeship would somehow get them through their dangerous journey safely.

  ‘I wanted them to have a good memory of Paris,’ I said.

  Roger tilted my chin with his fingertips so that I looked directly into his eyes. ‘You are my fondest memory of Paris.’

  Warm sparks danced along my arms and a tingle ran up my spine. But I couldn’t hold Roger’s gaze and looked away.

  ‘Come on,’ said the Australian soldier, tapping
Roger on the back. ‘Mademoiselle Fleurier is the one who got this whole thing started so I should at least get a chance to tango with the sheila.’

  Roger smiled and we reluctantly let each other go. Although every moment we spent together was precious, it was not the done thing to refuse a soldier a dance, not when there was a chance he could be killed the next day.

  ‘When the war is over, I will give a concert especially for all the men here tonight,’ I told the Australian.

  ‘Better not get my head blown off then,’ he grinned, leading me around the floor with the strength of a man trying to force open a door.

  When everyone was warmed up and tired out, Roger called a stop to the evening. I kissed each of the men and wished them luck before returning to my cold apartment downstairs. But although my bed sheets were like ice when I slipped into them, I was warm inside. I closed my eyes and did my best to fight off thoughts of Roger. This was a war. It was not the time to fall in love. And yet, in the midst of terrible events and in the most unlikely of circumstances, I could not deny that a light—so long turned off in my heart—had been switched on again.

  Within a few weeks of successfully getting the twenty soldiers across the demarcation line, we started receiving fewer servicemen at the apartment and more agents sent in by Britain to report back on enemy troop movements and military installations. We were also receiving radio operators and my journeys to southern France often involved hiding a transmitter or a headset in my luggage.

  One afternoon I was walking along the Rue Royale after a rendezvous to pick up forged papers for three men Madame Ibert was accompanying south the following day. The air stung my cheeks and the cold from the frozen cobblestones penetrated the soles of my shoes. Leather was no longer available, and even the shoes in the upmarket stores had wooden soles that clacked on the streets like horses’ hooves. The cold made my stomach ache and set my nerves on edge. If the winter was a trial for me, a wealthy woman who lived in an apartment with curtains, rugs and carpets, what must it be like for a poor family? Or for newborn babies? What must it be like in prison? My mind drifted to Fresnes prison. It was now empty of criminals—the Germans had jobs for thugs—but there were rumours of cries for help and screams of agony echoing into the night from its cells. The prisoners were Resistants who had been caught. Some of them were young students.

  Someone called out my name. I spun around to see a blonde woman standing in the door of Maxim’s and waving to me. She was wearing a blue dress, pinched at the waist, and a fur collar. It took me a moment to recognise her. Camille Casal.

  ‘I thought it was you,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

  Her hair was crimped and her face was made up with white powder and violet-black lipstick. My brain was so frozen with the cold that I wasn’t thinking properly and I stepped into the entrance as she bid me to. Maxim’s was no longer the opulent meeting place of artists and entertainers. It was the hedonistic den of the German high command and French collaborators.

  ‘You are so thin,’ observed Camille, eyeing me from my head to my shoes.

  I barely heard her. The warmth and the smell of cognac were intoxicating. There was the delicious aroma of melted butter and roasted duck in the air.

  ‘We were just about to eat,’ Camille said, propelling me towards the dining room. ‘You must join us.’

  I found myself standing in the room I had once known so well. I looked at its stained glass ceiling and the Art Nouveau murals. It was a place where courtesans had entertained princes, but it was full of other kinds of prostitutes now. I recognised a number of people from André’s old circle, including the daughters of several elite families.

  A table of Germans in uniform stood up when we entered. They nudged each other and smiled as Camille introduced me. There were only five of them but the table was laden with enough terrines of soup and foie gras, plates of caviar and vegetables in butter sauce to feed an army. Most of the officers were young with pink in their cheeks, but the man who stood up from the head of the table and leaned forward to kiss my hand was in his fifties with grey running through his black hair.

  ‘Colonel von Loringhoven,’ Camille said, sidling up to him and slipping her arm through his.

  My eye fell to the SS insignia on his collar. I pressed my purse with the forged documents tightly against my side. The SS was Hitler’s elite fighting force. Roger had told me that they had shot the Allied prisoners of war at Dunkirk, ignoring all the conventions that were followed by the regular German army. The refugees from the north had said that the SS had burned churches and destroyed crucifixes on their way through villages, claiming that Jesus Christ was the son of a Jewish whore and that they were bringing a new religion to France. Von Loringhoven was a colonel? Then he was one of the men who gave those orders.

  ‘He’s dashing, isn’t he?’ Camille whispered in my ear. ‘He saved me a room at the Ritz when they were kicking everybody else out.’

  I glanced from Colonel von Loringhoven to Camille and remembered the conversation we’d had at the café during the ‘phony war’. Was she so blind? This wasn’t another playboy or man-about-town. This wasn’t even an ordinary German soldier; this was a devil. Was the room at the Ritz worth her soul? The only excuse I could make for her was that she might be trying to provide for her daughter. I would have liked to take Camille aside and warn her, but I had Allied agents in my care and I had to think about safeguarding them first.

  I turned to Colonel von Loringhoven and gave him the most charming smile I could manage. ‘It has been a pleasure to meet you but I must go.’

  He smiled in return, showing a row of lizard-like teeth. When I turned and walked towards the foyer, I could feel his eyes penetrating my back. I had a sickening feeling that he hadn’t been fooled at all.

  In June, we heard on BBC radio that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. The radio operator staying with us that week was cheered by the news. She was a bilingual Englishwoman who had lived in Paris as a child, and had been sent by the Special Operations Executive to relay intelligence information to England. I asked her why Germany’s attack on Russia was good news. Didn’t it just mean another country under German subjugation?

  ‘Ah,’ she said, her eyes sparkling, ‘you’re French but you’ve forgotten. Napoleon attacked that inhospitable landscape and those hot-blooded people, and it was his undoing.’

  I took heart from what she said but the subsequent reports filled me with shame. Not only was the ill-equipped Russian army fighting to the last man and woman, but their civilians were too. Why had France given in so easily?

  In December, freezing again in our unheated apartments, we learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and that the United States had entered the war. At last, I thought. At last.

  ‘Surely, with help from the Americans, we can win the war now,’ said Madame Goux.

  But any hopes we had of a quick end to the war were dashed by the summer of 1942. The Germans were on the verge of taking Stalingrad and, with it, the Caucasus and their oil fields. They were also in Africa: Alexandria and Cairo were almost in their hands. Despite the radio operator’s confidence that the Germans were spreading themselves so thinly that they would collapse, they now had Iran, Iraq and India in their sights. Who would have thought that one European nation could spread so quickly, like a dark stain on the map of the world? Perhaps they would swarm over the United States as well.

  If I had sensed an inkling of evil in my encounter with Colonel von Loringhoven, then Paris and the rest of France were soon to see it too. Even some of the self-seeking collaborators started to wonder what malevolent force they had invited into their country. In July, the Nazis banned Jewish people from attending cinemas, theatres, restaurants, cafés, museums and libraries and even forbade them to use public telephone booths. They could only travel in the last two cars in the trains on the métro and had to wait for rations at inconvenient times. To identify them, they were forced to wear the yellow Star of David on their outer clothing
with the word ‘Jew’ in the centre.

  On my way to a rendezvous in Montmartre, I ran into Madame Baquet, who had given me my first job at the Café des Singes. She was wearing a yellow daffodil in her hair and a yellow scarf around her neck. Her male companion, who she introduced as her new act at the club, was wearing a star on his jacket with ‘Musician’ embroidered in the centre of it. ‘We’ve seen lots of interesting stars in Montmartre this morning,’ Madame Baquet said. ‘Buddhist…Hindu…Human Being.’

  I embraced both of them before going on my way. This was the France that I wanted to believe in: irreverent, egalitarian, humane.

  But the German high command saw nothing humorous in the gentle protest. One man paraded down the Champs élysées wearing his war medals next to his star and was beaten up by some SS soldiers and shot in the head. The shame of what was being done to their friends and neighbours spread through the city’s inhabitants as the man’s blood spread out on the pavement. The fact that a French veteran was killed so openly and in cold blood was not lost on them.

  A few days later, I received an instruction from Roger to cross the demarcation line and go to my family’s farm, accompanied only by Kira. Suspicions were becoming aroused and it seemed likely that I would soon have to move south permanently. Although I had registered with the Propagandastaffel, questions were being asked about why I wasn’t performing in Paris. With Maurice Chevalier, Mistinguett, Tino Rossi and others doing shows, it seemed my excuses were wearing thin. Adding to our problems was the fact that we could no longer receive radio operators in our building. Twice the German tracking vans had traced a signal in the area. Once we had been searched. Madame Goux hid the receiver by putting it into the cat cage and sticking Kira in front of it. The male radio operator and I stripped naked and jumped in the bath. We were so indignant when the Germans burst in that the red-faced soldiers withdrew quickly without noticing there was no water in the tub.