For years, Marshall had dreaded retirement. Mandatory premature retreat, he called it, infuriated at the federal law. He hated being forced out. He was perfectly healthy, and he had stopped smoking ten years ago. Asking a pilot to stop flying was like asking a librarian to burn books. Or a pianist to close the lid forever. Or a farmer to buy a condo in the city. His mind entertained new metaphors every day.
Retirement would be like the enforced passivity he had endured during the war, after the crash landing. Then, he was a caged bird.
The airline didn’t want rickety, half-blind ancients at the controls. Screw the airline, he thought now. Roaming Paris, he composed the thousandth rebuttal he would never send in: Since being let go on account of advanced age and feebleness, I’ve been forced to adopt a new career. Henceforth, I shall guide hikers up Mont Blanc, and on my days off I’ll be going skydiving.
The pilots Marshall hobnobbed with might talk about investments, or summer homes, or time-share condos, but none of them really cared about anything except flying. One former B-24 pilot golfed, and an ex-fighter jock intended to sail his deep-draft sloop around the world someday, but Marshall thought their pastimes were half-hearted substitutes. He was interested in everything to do with aviation, and he was always reading, but he thought hobbies were silly. Collecting swizzle sticks or crafting model airplanes—he couldn’t imagine. Whenever he thought of what to do with his retirement, he drew a blank. Pushing the throttles forward, racing down the runway, feeling the wings gain lift, pulling the yoke back and aiming high into the sky—that’s what his pilot friends really wanted. That’s what he wanted.
Marshall wandered down a street of five-story apartment buildings. This was the lovely, proportionate architecture he remembered.
The people who had helped him in Paris during the war would be retired now, he thought. The French retired young. Robert? Rohbehr. Marshall didn’t recall the young man’s last name, but he would never forget him. Robert and his clandestine missions. He remembered Robert appearing in the small hours of the morning with an urgent message. He remembered Robert letting his rucksack fall to the floor, then reaching in like a magician to produce cigarettes or a few priceless eggs. Once, he pulled out an actual rabbit, skinned and purple. From inside the lining of his coat came thin papers with secret messages. Whatever happened to him after the war?
…
CHAPTER 17
Back in his Paris hotel, alternating between insomnia and waking dreams, he could hear Annette Vallon’s singsong French, her playful teasing. During those three weeks in 1944 he thought he saw the soft baby fat of her cheeks grow thinner. Her mother insisted on giving him the largest portions of food. “You are large, monsieur,” Mme Vallon told him. “We do not need so much.”
“I don’t want this,” Annette said, moving a carrot on her plate. “You may have it.”
Perhaps she still needed the nourishment of milk, he thought. She needed meat. The milk ration, for children only, was for her younger sister, Monique. Food had been more plentiful in the country, on the farms and in Chauny with the Alberts.
He remembered the way Annette and her mother hugged so casually. He could see in them a happiness that persisted despite the hardships of wartime. Mme Vallon had embraced him too. She was small, and she had to reach up, but her warmth momentarily blotted out the war. He thought of his own mother, when she was a young woman, before she got sick.
Marshall had hardly ever paid attention to cooking, but in Paris food was so scarce it became a fixation. He watched Mme Vallon practice her art. With a small piece of chicken, a dab of saved butter, and some elaborate fussing with the pots on the wood-stove, she made a terrine, a sort of chicken Jell-O with a yellow layer at the bottom. She flavored it with bits of dried herbs.
“You need your strength for your journey,” she said, giving him a second helping.
He didn’t know when the journey would be, or how.
He offered them some francs from his escape kit. He had two thousand francs, oversized bills like pages from a book. The portrait of the woman in a helmet was Joan of Arc, he learned years later.
They would not take his money. “We do this gladly,” Mme Vallon insisted. “It is our necessity.”
“But you could buy a rabbit and some eggs,” he argued.
One evening she cooked a pot of tripe—the only item the butcher had left, she said. Marshall was revolted when he saw her scrubbing and soaking the hog’s entrails that afternoon. He ate sparingly, but M. Vallon treated the dish as a delicacy, making soft groans of appreciation.
“With more butter and some cream, this would be almost divine,” he said, but everyone knew he was pretending.
Annette nibbled. Monique did not speak at the table. Marshall hardly remembered her. A child of eight or ten?
They spoke English with him. Annette listened carefully when the adults spoke. Then she tried to offset the anxiety in their voices with her own girlish chatter. Her mother indulged her, he thought. He could see in her mother’s face what Annette would become. Mme Vallon wore her hair swept up, with long hairpins holding a pile of it. In the corner of the sitting room she sometimes brushed Annette’s hair, twirling it with her fingers. Annette’s hair was medium length, dark brown with curls framing her face. She wore no lipstick. Her clothing hung loosely on her thin frame. On Sundays she washed and ironed her blue smock for the school week. It was what the girls wore to protect their clothing, she explained, and it was a sort of uniform.
He remembered her sitting at a table, working with the buckles of her cowhide school bag, which she called her vache. She placed her books and papers inside purposefully—like a pilot packing his brain bag, he thought now.
In the morning, Mme Vallon went to the market early, and M. Vallon left soon after for his office. Marshall did not remember now where Monique had been.
“Time for your French lesson,” Annette announced.
The large apartment was cold, and Marshall was wearing three sweaters.
“Pronunciation, s’il vous plaît,” he said. “I’m lost.”
“My English teacher thinks I have a ‘bad’ accent,” she told him. “She tries to teach the way they say in England. Tomato—we say tuh-maht, they say tuh-MAHT-oe; that’s easy. But you say toe-MAY-toe. I have fear that my teacher will recognize where I am getting an American accent!”
She made him a tea of herbs, plentiful because the Germans detested herbs and had not appropriated all of them. She rubbed a piece of leftover bread with some mint and a little oil and warmed it on the stove. He had built a small fire with some chips of coal and paper so that her mother could make coffee, a substitute made of acorns—or perhaps cockleburs and birdseed. Marshall didn’t know.
“Perhaps Maman will bring an egg. I will cook it for you in this fragrant oil.”
“Mais non. You and your mother should have it.”
“No, you have half, and Maman and I share half.” She wiped the pan with a lump of bread she had saved. She smiled. “Perhaps Maman will bring some butter. And cinnamon.”
“And cornmeal.”
She didn’t understand, and when he explained she turned up her nose.
“One doesn’t eat that,” she said. “Food for the animals.”
“Then maybe she will bring some more of those delicious pig guts we had last night!”
“Les tripes! Mmm. Bonnes. Bonnes.”
They laughed.
She made him pronounce all the words they had discussed. The words for corn and cinnamon and butter. Eggs. Bread.
“Perhaps I make us too hungry,” she said apologetically, reaching to pull up her limp white sock that was sagging into her shoe.
“It’s all right to talk about food,” he said. “I think about food every day!” “We should speak of other things,” she said emphatically. “Now, let’s learn flowers.”
“Do I need to know flowers? I was never any good with botany. Botanique?”
“Well, then, trees. It is necessary to
know les arbres.” She led him through a list of trees, then some animals. “At our summer house in Normandy, we had geese and chickens. We could have stayed there since the beginning of the war, when everyone suddenly left Paris, but we returned. Maman insisted we were in more danger there than here. My father had to be here, and I must be here to do what I can to help,” she said.
“Do your parents hide many aviators? How do you feed them?” He wasn’t supposed to ask his helpers questions, so the Krauts couldn’t force anything out of him if he got caught.
She shrugged. “We manage.”
“And what do you do?” He knew she went somewhere Friday afternoons after school.
“You are not to know.” She smiled. “The Germans, if they are on the bus, I put my books beside me and occupy as much space as possible. I enjoy making inconvenience for them. Also, it is amusing to drop my books at their feet. In a way they are gentlemen. ‘Oh, mademoiselle, I must assist you!’ and in another way they are ready to make the arrest. But they do not, not the schoolgirls. So they think they are kind and helpful, but we are laughing at them. Every little bit of trouble we can cause, innocently—‘Oh, it is only the schoolgirls’—is a way to express our frustration.”
“Should you be provoking the Germans?” he asked. “It sounds dangerous.”
“I know. But how can one resist?”
Mme Vallon was at the door, with her groceries, mostly rutabagas.
“Your usual catch,” Marshall said, but he could not make the expression understood.
“If this war ever ends, I will never touch another rutabaga!” Mme Vallon said, depositing the bags on the kitchen table.
“Did you find anything else?” Annette asked, poking into the smaller bag.
“I have ten grams of butter—very precious. I have the sugar. We must get along without even ersatz coffee. Tomorrow, they said. No bread, of course. All the farina is going to Germany. Maybe our men working at the factories will get some of it.” Mme Vallon rummaged deeper in the bag. “One cheese ration.”
“Let me imagine,” Annette said. “Tonight, baked rutabaga with cheese. A soupçon of butter.”
“A tiny pinch of sugar with the butter,” her mother said with a smile. “I have some herbs.”
They warned him to stay away from the dining room window, which gave onto the street, but he could watch from a side angle through the lace curtains. He saw only an occasional vehicle—a Kübelwagen or a Mercedes-Benz flying a small flag with a swastika on it. The building was on a corner, and his bedroom overlooked a small side street. The blackout curtains at night cocooned him. He heard few traffic noises. People were out in the mornings and flocking home late in the day, after dark. He watched them, did exercises to keep his muscles from cramping with inactivity, and studied French. For months as a pilot trainee he had studied mechanical manuals: hydraulic pressures, lift angles. In January he had been keeping house in his barracks, writing lovesick letters to Loretta, trying to squelch suspense over the next mission. During the day he attended lectures and flew trial runs, and ten times in two months he had been out on wild sky rides, lugging bombs. A few times he had visited the villages near the base, and once he had been to London. Now, he was trying to talk French and reading Verlaine. He was almost twenty-four years old. He had stepped into an alternate life, like Alice in Wonderland, down a rabbit hole—but without his Bugs Bunny jacket.
There was hardly anything he could do to help Mme Vallon. He envied Robert, the good-humored young guy who came by bringing fresh meat wrapped in paper. He brought cigarettes. Marshall listened for his bicycle, arriving in the downstairs foyer. Robert was slender but powerfully built, with thick hair and dark eyes. He always seemed to be on urgent business. Marshall imagined him as a daring Resistance agent out gathering intelligence or transporting explosives, while Marshall himself sat out the war behind lace curtains.
Annette teased Marshall for lolling around the house while she worked so hard at school. She teased him for his efforts at French, even while she patiently coached him. And she teased him for the rude outfits he had to wear—the layers of old sweaters, the too-short pants, the rough socks, the cloth slippers with the seams loosened to make room for his huge toes.
At the table the family managed to make their meager dinners last for hours, regaling one another with jokes at the Germans’ expense and family stories that Marshall thought must have been often told.
“The wine makes us convivial,” said Mme Vallon. “We forget the difficulties.”
M. Vallon did not speak of his work at the city hall, but Marshall observed that he came home with extra ration books.
“If they fail to account for the number, who is to know?” Marshall overheard M. Vallon say—but in French, so Marshall wasn’t sure.
Once M. Vallon said to Marshall, “I am an honest man. I have always been an honest man. It is for honor, for patriotism, that we take care of the aviateurs.”
“We are not violent,” said Mme Vallon. “But we can do this.”
“The Germans were a people of culture,” M. Vallon said sadly. “I do not permit myself to believe that every German connives in this conquest.”
“We are ancient enemies,” Mme Vallon said.
From time to time, hints of despair broke through the Vallons’ determined tranquility. But they quickly assured themselves that de Gaulle and his Free French troops would liberate Paris soon. Any day the débarquement of the Allies would begin. In the evenings the family played card games and conversed. At nine o’clock, Annette’s parents tuned in to the BBC on the wireless for the news of France. Chut! Shh!
One night, they were awakened by explosions followed by sirens. In the chilly dark they were all out of bed, peeking from behind the curtains.
“It is not far,” said Mme Vallon. “The smoke is across the park.”
“Whatever happens, I will not consent to leave Paris again,” said her husband. “The exodus in 1940 was shameful. We will not descend to that again.”
The Real Girl in the Blue Beret
Featured at newyorker.com, Page Turners, May 18, 2013
I didn’t know if Michèle Moët-Agniel was still alive. She would be over eighty by now. I had written her a letter—in painstaking French—in August, 2007, and it was now January, 2008. I mailed another copy of the letter with an updated note. I told her I was coming to Paris in the spring and very much wanted to meet her because I was writing a novel about the war years, when she was a teen-ager in the French Resistance.
I studied the photo of her with my father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, taken in 1993 at a reunion of Allied aviators and the Europeans who had helped them escape from the Germans during the Second World War. (Barney was one of these former airmen.) I regretted that I had not been there to meet her then. In the photo, she looked attractive in a short-sleeved yellow dress, and she had the air of someone energetic and fun-loving. A firecracker. I knew that my in-laws had celebrated a D-Day anniversary with her in France, but they are dead now, and all I had was her address.
Barney, a B-17 copilot, at twenty-three, had been shot down near the French border with Belgium, and he spent several weeks hiding in safe houses before being sent to Paris by the Resistance. Michèle, then a girl of seventeen, guided him from Gare du Nord to an apartment where he was hidden. Later she led him on the Metro from her home in Saint Mandé to the Photomaton near the Louvre to make a photo for a fake I.D. He remembered her as the girl in the blue beret. He was supposed to follow her, and they were not to acknowledge each other.
Michèle and her parents had worked with the Bourgogne network, one of many secret networks of ordinary citizens who wanted to participate nonviolently in the Resistance. These networks, the best known of which was the Comète line, returned over three thousand Allied aviators to safety—across the English Channel or over the Pyrenees. Ominous posters throughout Paris warned citizens against helping stranded airmen—men would be shot, women sent to concentration camps.
I had be
gun my novel with little more than the title, “The Girl in the Blue Beret,” and the notion that a retired airline captain decides to return to France to find the people who had helped him during the war after his bomber crash-landed. I didn’t know what he would find when he got to France, but I knew that he would be searching for the girl in the blue beret. I especially wanted to find a Frenchman who could inspire a character. I made plans to travel to France.
Finally, I received a letter from Michèle Moët-Agniel. Although she had done few interviews, she agreed to meet me because of the link to my father-in-law. I knew that she and her parents had been arrested and deported in 1944 for helping aviators. She and her mother were sent to Ravensbruck, and her father had died at Buchenwald. I could not match these facts in my mind with the vivacious woman who greeted me so warmly.
She was a widow. Her small apartment near the Bois de Vincennes was filled with massive old furniture. The armoire could have hidden a stray airman. (Actually, many airmen were hidden in armoires during the war.) Michèle wore a bright red skirt, a black sweater, and pearls. She had white curls, intense hazel eyes, and a fluttery, enthusiastic manner. She served me coffee, fruit, chocolate, and pâtisseries.
Her English was much better than my wobbly French, but we consulted her well-thumbed dictionary. She had always intended to write her memoirs, she said. But she had procrastinated. Sighing, she said, “It is too difficile.”
Since the nineteen-eighties she has been active with other former political prisoners in documenting the deportations, and she (a former teacher) takes her scrapbooks about the war years to the schools to show children what life was like then.
As she showed me one of these scrapbooks—full of ration books, letters, news clippings, photos, and a secret notebook in which fifty aviators had written their names and addresses—she seemed flustered and clumsy, scattering the photos and papers.
A photo fell to the floor. Picking it up, she said, “This is Jean Carbonnet. I went with him on the train to guide pilots. Sometimes we went to Noyon or Chauny. Once we went to Lizio, a petite village, where nineteen pilots were hidden. We escorted seven of them to Paris in one journey.”
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