April in Paris

by Michael Wallner

  I knew from a conversation with Leibold that they’d discovered this method by chance. An SS lieutenant had ordered a rather elderly suspect to be brought in for questioning, but shortly after giving the order, the lieutenant forgot all about it. Since the guards’ orders were to escort the man to the lieutenant’s office and nothing else, they left him standing there in front of the desk. Meanwhile, the lieutenant had gone home. The prisoner stood there for the rest of the afternoon and throughout the night, but at some point the following morning, he fell down in a dead faint. Although this had all happened through simple negligence, it gave them an effective, practical idea. After days without sleep, people under questioning got confused and gave away information no amount of beating could pry loose. In the harsh light of the interrogation room, they would nod off, their chins on their chests; blows and buckets of water awakened them. In the end, they broke down and confessed—so they could sleep.

  I stood in the bright room. The corporals guarding me were relieved at irregular intervals. I was under observation every second. The situation became a torment sooner than I’d assumed it would. Military training had familiarized me with standing still for long periods of time, but on the drill field, you could foresee the end of your ordeal. Here, the endlessness of the procedure was what made it so insidious. I considered letting myself drop and faking a faint, but my dread of the blows that would bring me back to consciousness was worse than remaining upright. I tried different methods of shortening the time. One way was to count to a hundred with all my weight on my right leg, shift to the left, and count to a hundred again. As I repeated this process for the tenth time, I noticed that the circulation in my legs was slowing down and realized that it would be better to stand with my weight evenly distributed.

  I kept on counting, for no particular reason. My back and shoulders began to ache. I tried bracing my hands against my hips. A shout from one of the corporals, and my thumbs were lined up with my trouser seams again. My head seemed brightly lighted inside, and then darker and darker. Later, I thought I saw a bit of red. The wall dissolved before my eyes until it suddenly became impossibly clear. I started projecting a mental map onto the flaking plaster. I invented landmasses and straits and mountain ranges, which I provided with colors. I couldn’t maintain my concentration for longer than a few minutes. My body stopped going along and made its presence felt with full force. I nodded off and then jerked my head up; it sank down again. Someone cried out. I stood there with my eyes wide open and felt my chin trembling. The wire in my jaw. The wall went fuzzy; I believed I was still staring at it, but in fact I was already dreaming. My eyelids closed. I fell forward.

  Two arms pulled me up; fists worked over my kidneys, my ribs. I gasped and they let me go. I got to my feet unaided. I thought at first that the blows had woken me, but this condition didn’t last long. I tottered, pulled myself together, stood stiffly.

  The procedure was repeated several times, escorting me deeper and deeper into a desperate state I was hardly conscious of. My eyes shut instinctively, but the remnants of my will forced me to stay awake. I shivered and broke into a sweat. My clothes seemed to have become too tight and were on the point of bursting. I had the impression that my feet were swelling up, that my entire body weight was flowing into my feet, which couldn’t support me any longer. The light above my head began moving in a circle. The room expanded and then shrank until it pressed down on my shoulders. The blows striking me showed that I’d fallen asleep again. The next time I raised my head, Chantal stood beside me.

  “Gustave was with the first troops called up to the Maginot Line,” she said.

  “Chantal,” I whispered.

  “Shut your trap,” the corporal cried.

  I signaled to her with my eyes that I was no longer allowed to speak.

  “Gustave wrote to me and said the older soldiers had imagined this war would be worse than the previous one—and now they found themselves worn down by monotony. The Germans didn’t attack for months.”

  Chantal raised one foot and braced her heel against the wall. Her skirt slipped up over her knee. I envied her because she was allowed to lean.

  “To relieve the boredom, dancing girls performed for the troops, and so did actors. Once they even had Maurice Chevalier.”

  This went right through me. I raised my head so carefully that the corporals didn’t notice. “Chevalier?” I asked, moving only my lips.

  Chantal nodded. “He sang for them. Do you know how long the Germans waited to attack?”

  “Until April,” I whispered. “The offensive was ordered for April.” The wire hurt me when I laughed.

  “This guy still thinks the whole thing’s funny!” a corporal cried.

  I heard them stand up, and I stiffened my shoulders.

  “Maurice Chevalier.” I giggled.

  The door opened; the replacements came in. During the few seconds afforded by the switch, I turned to Chantal. “You know the song, the one about the girl in April?” I asked.

  A kick in the back of my knee. I collapsed under their blows. When I raised my head, the window behind the men was full of light. I moved my tongue inside my mouth, groaning. It seemed to me I said something. They dragged me into the next room. Leibold was sitting behind the desk, stirring a cup of coffee.

  26

  I was awakened. Had I slept? I lay on the plank bed like a man coming out of a drunken stupor; my head was a dismal insect. How long had I been here? Was it the same day, or the day after that? How was it that they had let me sleep? I must have made some confession. A question tormented me: Had I known something I couldn’t even remember? Why had they allowed me to go to sleep?

  I sat up, not without difficulty. The sun was behind the building, which meant it must be past noon. I made an effort to think clearly. If I’d revealed some crucial information, I was now useless to them, and soon they’d have me shot. If they hoped for more revelations, their decision to let me sleep was inexplicable. I didn’t have much time left. I remembered the strip of paper—and Henri. I took off my ID tags and started tapping. Three, pause, three again. After a short while, an answer came. Henri was listening.

  Confession? I signaled. Haven’t a clue. Chantal?

  Could he figure out my situation from those questions? Did Henri know Chantal personally, or had he been informed by another cell? In my imagination, I suddenly stopped seeing him as a picture-book Frenchman. Now Henri was a clever young lad who had contacts everywhere, dressed well, and pursued only his own interest. But this image also faded, and while I waited for him to answer, Henri changed again. I saw him sitting next to the heating pipe; he was wearing a black uniform and transcribing my taps. Frightened, I pulled back from the wall, but then I calmed myself with the thought that I wasn’t important enough to justify such an expense of energy as phony tap messages and notes passed through the prison barber; that was too complicated for the SS. They could use their usual methods to find out whatever they wanted.

  The sound of rapid tapping came through the wall: Tomorrow. Interrogation. Evening. Garden shed. Then nothing more.

  Thoughts flooded my brain. Chantal belonged to the Resistance. Recently, its organization had become more refined. There were French civilian employees in the rue des Saussaies who maintained the heating and cleaned the lavatories. Could one of them know how to smuggle prisoners out of the building? And why me? What made me so extraordinary? Weren’t there hundreds of arrests every day? Many detainees were shot without further ado. It seemed presumptuous to hope I wouldn’t receive the standard treatment in this situation. Although I was bursting with questions, I put my ID tags back on. Henri hadn’t expressed himself so curtly for nothing. Tomorrow. Interrogation. Evening. Garden shed.

  I waited impatiently for the sounds that announced the evening meal, when the food cart stopped in front of the neighboring cells. When the little window opened and I held out my bowl, I asked for a
large portion. I wanted to be fortified for the following day. The old server, a trusty, wrinkled his forehead, but then he dipped the ladle a second time. I held the brimming bowl carefully and took slow spoonfuls, tasting for the various ingredients. Peas, some soft grain, a few chunks of rind. I chewed like someone who’d lost his teeth.

  Next, I turned my attention to my eye. I’d protected it as well as I could while they were beating me. Carefully, I took the bandage off and touched the injured spot. I felt a scab and a moist pouch of what might have been pus. I shifted my eyes from side to side; the vision in my left eye was still blurred. I decided to take my chances without a bandage from now on. I lay down on the bed early and tried to sleep.

  I came awake. There were noises outside in the corridor. The thought that they were coming to get me filled me with anticipation and fear. But it was someone else being brought in. I heard the detainee whimper and snuffle. At the end of the corridor, he screamed, but there was no way of making out what he said. I couldn’t go back to sleep. A wheel of questions turned incessantly, round and round. Dawn was breaking when my head sank onto my chest.

  I slept through breakfast. When I woke up, I was annoyed at myself for such negligence. I would need all my strength that evening. I tried doing push-ups on the stone floor. After three, I lay there on my chest, wretched and out of breath. Since nothing else could be done, I started walking again. I marched until it was time for the midday meal, after which I slept some more, lying on the plank bed, wearing my boots and my jacket. I wanted to be ready for anything. When night began to fall, I took the little piece of paper—Chantal’s message—out of the straw mattress, read the lines with tender confidence, wrapped the paper around my nail, and threw it into the slop bucket. I was ready to leave my cell.

  Nothing happened. The food cart with the evening meal came and went. Another hour passed. Work in the offices must have ended long since; they pulled night shifts only in the most urgent cases. I hauled myself up on the window bars and tried to see around the corner, but I couldn’t pick out the window in my old department. Disappointed, I let myself drop, turned my back to the wall, and slid down to the floor. Where was Henri? I fell asleep sitting up.

  Two days went by. Nothing unusual broke the daily routine. No one came to interrogate me, nor was there any sign of Henri, no matter how often I clicked my ID tags against the wall. I gave the food server questioning looks and ran to the peephole whenever footsteps approached. Thus I got myself into a state that consisted solely of uninterrupted waiting, which led me to do crazy things. I yanked off my boots because I felt a tiny fold in my sock that had to be smoothed out. I pulled myself up to the window and searched the opposite wall for messages. Then I brooded over whether or not Chantal had been caught. Why was she making me wait?

  On the third night, I lay down on my bed early and stared at the ceiling like a man who was waiting to be hanged but didn’t know what time the event would take place. And then—perhaps an hour later—I suddenly saw myself, in my prisoner pathos, as the epitome of wretchedness. My situation, my shattered nerves, meant only one thing: I was a miserable failure. I’d wanted to be someone else, to go for a walk between the lines—as a Frenchman, as a German, whichever I pleased. Leading Leibold by the nose, fooling the French—it had seemed so simple. What became clearest of all to me in those hours on my plank bed was this: I had believed there was no need for me to take up a position. I had just wanted to strip off the German and slip inside the Frenchman whenever I felt like it.

  Never in my romantic euphoria had I wondered about Chantal’s motives or taken into consideration the reasons that counted for her. Now I saw that she had acted tactically from the first moment on. She’d played with me, delivered me into her people’s hands, and later, although she recognized my infatuation, she hadn’t hesitated to translate their plan into action. Chantal had always been engaged in the struggle, while I, tangled up in the idyll of my imaginings, had merely been fleeing reality. She’d kept the enemy in her sights while I was trying to shuttle back and forth between the lines. She’d gone into the whorehouse to kill the hated occupier. She’d changed something. All I’d changed were the terms of my comfort. I’d wanted to escape Reich and Führer, and so I fled to the Frenchman, to Monsieur Antoine. When he looked at me, I became the dull, stolid German, taking it easy on the banks of the Seine. Chantal had liked me; I no longer believed that she’d respected me. In her eyes, I was a chameleon, a man who yielded to any pressure, who was neither this nor that. There had been nothing heroic about my transformation into Monsieur Antoine; I was no daring charlatan, pulling a fast one on his own people. I was a coward who didn’t dare make his opposition public. Leibold’s brutish corporals were clearer about their convictions than I was about mine. In my arrogance and presumption, I had even hoped to be freed; I’d thought I could escape the people whose only remaining expense on my account would be for the bullet they were going to put in the back of my head.

  That’s what I was, and it was high time for me to realize it. There had never been an escape plan. There had never been an Henri. Whatever lay ahead for me, whether interrogation or liquidation, I was resolved not to be taken in by promises again. When I finally fell asleep, I did so with the knowledge that I wasn’t fooling myself anymore.

  27

  In the middle of the night, they came for me. They allowed me sufficient time to get properly dressed. Before we left the cell, I looked around, as though I dared not forget anything. We walked down the silent corridor. Many a prisoner was on the other side of his peephole, listening to our footsteps, happy that it was someone else and not himself who was being taken out. We went past the barbering room, past the doctor’s station, and downstairs into the frigid courtyard. The open space was so white and bright, I thought at first it was illuminated by the moon, but in fact, the beam came from a large searchlight mounted on the roof ridge. A path shoveled through the snow lay in front of us. One SS soldier walked ahead of me, the other one behind, both of them sullen and weary.

  I heard a buzz that seemed out of place in the soundless night. For a fraction of a second, I tensed my muscles and looked around. We’d reached the end of the courtyard, a little distance from the steps leading to Leibold’s room. Beyond the steps was the garden shed, clearly visible in the garish light. The shed door—laths nailed to crosspieces—was slightly ajar. The padlock hung down at an angle, and the bolt was drawn back.

  The buzzing ended in a detonation. The searchlight on the roof exploded. Voices and cries in the darkness. The sudden absence of light took all eyes by surprise. I sprang forward, shoved the leading SS private out of my way, charged into the deep snow, sank down, pumped my knees high, and bounded in the direction of the garden shed. Some contours grew visible again. Shouts of dismay from the privates, the sounds of safety catches being released. I collided with the wall of the shed, which I’d guessed was farther away. I could see enough to recognize the crack where the shed door stood open, and I stepped through it. I ran with my arms out in front of me and with no idea of what I was heading for. Gunshots struck the door, splintering the wood.

  I banged into a wall, but then I found a passage that apparently led into the back building. Thick, persistent darkness. Groping my way along, I realized I’d entered a dwelling of some kind. Soft chairs, the outline of a fireplace. The next room was the kitchen; light shimmered in from the courtyard. I flinched when a figure appeared in the doorway.

  “Vite, par ici,” a man said.

  Approaching footsteps, coming the way I’d come. No time for questions. I followed him through the door, which he quickly locked behind us. Steps leading downward, damp walls; the beam from his flashlight ripped projecting stonework and electric wires from the darkness. The man hastened along ahead of me. We were in a ramifying system of cellars. At the end of a corridor, he came to a stop. Three steps mounted to a wooden door.

  He shined the light on me. “Might fit,” he
said, throwing me a few pieces of clothing. A pair of shoes rolled toward me, as well.

  “Who are you?” I gasped, getting out of my boots and unbuttoning my shirt.

  “Quick, quick!”

  Not a Parisian. He spoke like someone from the northern coast, perhaps Normandy. And there was something about the way he threw me the clothes. While I changed my shirt, I saw that the man had only one arm.

  “Are you the gardener?”

  He eyed me suspiciously. “I know nothing about you, and you know nothing about me.”

  “Did Henri set this up with you?”

  “Get on with it!” he cried when I took too long to tie my shoe.

  “Where am I supposed to go?” The jacket was too tight under the arms, and the pants were too big in the waist.

  “I’m letting you out this door.”

  “Where shall I hide?”

  He stuck the key in the lock and shoved me up the steps. Cold night air. “Good luck.”

  “Do you have any money?”

  The door was already closed. The key turned in the lock. The whole thing had lasted no more than two minutes, if that. Only now did I notice that I’d stopped hearing our pursuers. Quickly, I tried to get my bearings: I was in a side street not far from the church of La Madeleine. I could have reached the entrance to my former workplace by merely going around the corner. For a moment, I savored the cold January night, breathed the air of freedom. But where could I go without papers and without a centime in my pocket? I stepped out of the recess. The shoes were soft; I was doing the soft shoe right out of rue des Saussaies.

  I quickly got a few blocks away and then stopped to listen; no hint of a search operation under way. I walked out of the neighborhood unmolested and soon noticed that I was going toward my old hotel. A ridiculous habit. I paused in the shadow of a willow tree. I could think of only one place that seemed safe: the ruined entryway in the building near the horse butcher’s shop, where I had undergone my metamorphosis.