April in Paris

by Michael Wallner

  “Don’t,” he said crossly.

  I ran. The others’ steps were so close behind me, I figured I’d be granted the coup de grâce any moment now. Holding the books with both hands—why were there no shots?—I dashed up the first flight of stairs and then the second. Apparently, they wanted me alive. There was no escape for me anywhere. My breathing grew loud. I leaped up three steps at a time; from below me came the sound of hobnailed boots, in no hurry.

  I’d made the discovery three nights before. The weak spot in the wall, the sabotaged spot. The padlock on the attic door was massive and solid. But its frame was pegged into crumbly masonry. I’d hoped that a certain amount of effort would enable me to lever the peg out of the wall and get into the attic. I’d used a sharp-edged piece of scrap iron as a tool and scraped away for hours during each of the last few nights.

  The sound of Leibold’s voice issuing orders mingled with the stamping noise of the boots. I ran past Wasserlof’s flat. I was certain it had been gone through quite thoroughly. Soon I stood before the iron door, panting openmouthed and yanking on the lock. The metal frame didn’t budge. I pressed my fingers underneath it and tore at it in a frenzy. The peg moved a millimeter and then sprang back. I pulled on it and heard Leibold and his men reach the third floor. I bent lower and the books fell to the floor. I groped for the piece of scrap iron and rammed it between the wall and the frame. Sharp edges cut into the balls of my fingers. I levered like a madman, screamed in desperation—and suddenly the frame was in my hand. Blood. There wasn’t enough time to pick up both books, so I grabbed the nearest one and stumbled into the dark. Shouts from down below; they’d found my escape route. I closed my eyes in the total darkness, then opened them again and saw the rectangular outline of the skylight, dim against a black background. I shoved the book down the front of my trousers, buttoned my jacket over it, and hurried over to the skylight. The lock was high up and rusted shut. I had no choice but to ram the glass window with my head. At first, the glass cracked, and then the skylight burst; glass shards rained down on my shoulders. I bent the wooden frame backward. The SS soldiers reached the attic door; the beams from their flashlights danced.

  I stuck my arms out into the open air above my head, gathered myself, and jumped. Although I was out of breath and there was hardly anything in my stomach, I had enough strength to pull myself up. I thrust my shoulders out, heaved myself higher, and hung for a moment between heaven and earth. Then, quickly clearing my legs, I rolled onto the steep-pitched roof, held on to the skylight frame, and looked around. Only a thin layer of snow covered the shingles, but I could feel ice beneath it. I clambered up.

  Now there were shots; they were firing through the roof. One of them shone his light through the opening and shot into the night. I saw the flash from his weapon and felt the bullet hiss past me. I scrambled higher, clawed the shingles, slid back, kicked out, and at last grabbed the round ridge of the roof. Drawing in my breath with a shriek, I pulled myself up the rest of the way, straddled the crest, and scooted along on the seat of my pants. My pursuer’s head turned in my direction; he fired. Two bullets whizzed past me, but the third one found its mark and tore through my ribs. I crumpled over, toppling onto the other side of the roof. There was a dormer window, a projection of some sort, maybe a ledge. As my side started to burn, I let go and slid down on my shoulder. The adjoining roof, coming in at a corresponding angle, slowed my fall, but I couldn’t grasp anything. I slid past raised, snowy roof tiles, grabbing at them wildly while my feet thrashed about, looking for traction. Ice everywhere. I seized a hook—briefly—and felt a hot stabbing in my hand. Something tore. I shot out over the gutter and caught hold of the thin metal at the last second. It cracked and started to come apart. I held on tightly, as though the gutter were a flying carpet. Even this last handhold was ripped away from me. For a long moment, I was completely free in the blackness. Happy to have escaped them, to have flown away into the night.

  30

  The eyes of the Virgin Mary. Also a dim reddish light. I wasn’t really awake. Only groaning. Consciousness disappeared again.

  Later, lying on my side, I felt warmth on my back. Soft watery sounds. Someone was washing me. A powerful forearm, a broad figure bent over my body, curly hair. The shape held still and looked at me.

  “So you’re really there,” a woman’s voice said.

  Unable to move. I was a sigh, nothing more. I heard quiet laughter. Water ran along my back. Time.

  Languid, drowsy, dozing; I didn’t want to wake up. I was able to perceive but not to discern. The room and the sounds seemed close. Someone came and went. Above me, a picture on the wall: La Vierge Marie. A figure dressed in blue, standing in a pleasant garden. The first world I saw. Looking serious, God’s mother pointed upward, but the top part of the picture lay in shadow. I tried to imagine a dove.

  Had I moved? The person in the room stood still, wiped her hands, came closer.

  “Are you awake? Are you awake?”

  I turned my eyes away from the Virgin. Pain grabbed me and shook my whole body.

  “No. You’ve still got a long way to go,” the woman said.

  She bent lower. She was older but by no means elderly. Her eyes weren’t merry, her nose was flat, and only her mouth smiled. Dark hair with gray streaks. A blue apron dress of some soft fabric.

  “I don’t have anything to help your pain,” she said. “Nothing at all.” She pointed to me.

  No strength to lift my head and look at myself. My body must have been shattered. Two pieces of wood ran along my right arm, starting at the shoulder. Splints made of boards. They gently knocked against each other. Around my left hand, a thick bandage.

  “I’m no doctor.” She shifted the splinted arm to a different position. “There isn’t any doctor. You have to eat something.” The pain was dull and distant.

  “I wonder if you’ve still got one sound bone in your body,” she said. Her hand moved toward my hair. “You have to eat,” she declared, stressing the words. “You understand me?”

  I wasn’t wearing anything that could tell her where I came from. How did she know I wasn’t French?

  “You’re the crazy boche.” She straightened her back. “Look, I know that much.” My eyes questioned her.

  “I’m the concierge. My name is Valie.”

  I jumped. Leibold had come out of the concierge’s booth. He’d been lurking in there, waiting for me.

  She noticed the fright in my eyes. “At first, I hid you in the cellar. The building’s four hundred years old. The cellar has a cellar even older than that. They looked for you the whole night and all the next day. They’ll probably come again.” She followed my eyes to the picture of the Virgin Mary. “Now we’re somewhere else.”

  Suddenly, she smiled. “I saw you go up to the flat with the young lady. You two went up there twice.” She said these words as though they contained a great mystery.

  “I know the Wasserlof flat,” she went on as she stood up. “Why doesn’t the young lady go there anymore?” When I didn’t answer, she left the room. “You’ll tell me all about it sometime.”

  I listened to my breathing. She’d called me a boche. She was hiding me. She’d managed to conceal me from the search teams. Was this another of Leibold’s traps? Where was the room I was in? The building? My staying here seemed as unreal to me as the time I’d spent unconscious. Where had I landed when I fell?

  I uttered a sound. She came back. It took me a long time to form the word: “Today.”

  She leaned forward. “It’s the beginning of February. The sixth, I believe.”

  She smiled at the moan that escaped me. “Yes, you’ve been down a long time. You were dead, believe me. Dead. All you had left was a little spark. You were all smashed up, but you didn’t let the little spark go out. You’re tough, boche. Now let me go and warm your soup.” She disappeared from sight.

  The concierge
fed me. She put the end of a little metal funnel in my mouth. I wanted to bite down on it, but I couldn’t. I thought the wire in my jaw was broken, but I noticed that I was missing a couple of teeth on the left side. Valie carefully poured soup into the funnel. The liquid ran down from the corners of my mouth. When she moved the funnel to the right, things went better. I drank and swallowed, savoring the warmth.

  “You still can’t bite,” she said. “But it looks like you can swallow all right.” She smiled. “So not everything in there is broken.”

  I listened to my insides, trying to follow the path of the soup.

  31

  Gradually, I started to believe I’d escaped death. Days and weeks passed, during which the only changes were trivial. Daphne blooms appeared on Valie’s chest of drawers and then were taken away. One afternoon, the sun was so bright it lit up the whole picture of the Madonna. There actually was a dove hovering over her, surrounded by the symbol of the Holy Trinity. I contemplated the sunlit picture until the light disappeared again, centimeter by centimeter.

  In this period, Chantal didn’t visit me even once. In my daydreams, I imagined her as a warrior, dressed in dark trousers, her hair pinned up under her cap. She knew how to handle weapons. I rarely saw her in her light green dress. She said nothing; she only sat there on the bed or walked past it. It became clearer and clearer to me that Chantal couldn’t have known anything. She’d never learned of my arrest. Therefore, she hadn’t sent me any secret messages. Ultimately, I accepted the notion that Henri had been a kind of tapping poltergeist that Leibold had put in my head. I’d gone reeling through the Parisian winter on his behalf.

  One morning, I asked the concierge, more with gestures than with words, to bring me my books. She gave me the one I’d stuck in my pants before going off the roof. It wasn’t the Fables. They’d probably fallen into Leibold’s hands and were gone for good. The open atlas lay on my stomach. Valie sat next to me, turning the pages and looking at maps of the poles, the configurations of Oceania and Southeast Asia. Since I could move neither arms nor hands, I asked her to turn to France. France: post-1918 boundaries. Cities, rivers, regions.

  I was looking for a short, simple name. Something regal was hidden in it. The word began with an F or a B. I was sure it would come back to me. The village, the hamlet, where Chantal’s grandfather’s property was—the place whose name she’d scribbled in the margin of the Fables. Every day, I spent hours trying to recall that name. My eyes slid over the various towns. I didn’t want to admit to myself that I had, inexplicably, forgotten it.

  Valie brought me soup—vegetable soup, mostly. Once, she dipped bits of white bread in milk and put it in my mouth piece by piece. I chewed it with my gums and the stumps of my remaining teeth. How good it tasted! From that day on, she brought me bread soup every day.

  I often thought about how I could properly thank Valie for taking care of me. However, my suspicion that she might be working for Leibold had not vanished altogether. When my face had healed to the point where I could speak, I asked her, “Why are you doing this for me?”

  Valie was sitting on the stool next to my bed. It was evening.

  “I knew Wasserlof,” she said. Her hands lay motionless on her apron. “One day, he arrived with a lady and gentleman from Germany and showed them the apartment. Monsieur and Madame Hirschbiegel were elegant people. Monsieur gave me something for my trouble.”

  She stood up and rummaged about the room. “After that, he often came to Paris alone, even after Wasserlof died. When the Germans marched in, I asked him, ‘What’s going to happen with the flat?’ He said, ‘I guess I’m not going to get around to painting it.’ That made us both laugh.” Valie’s cheeks glowed. “One day, well into the war, Hirshbiegel’s son showed up to try out his key. He doesn’t look like his father. Then you and the young lady came. In the end, the Germans came.” Valie shrugged her shoulders. “That’s it.”

  I didn’t understand her cheerfulness. She was talking about the enemy, after all. Hirschbiegel was a Wehrmacht lieutenant. I myself was the enemy who’d occupied the city and had his fun with a Parisian girl. I asked Valie about this. She only smiled and left the room without answering.

  She was in her middle forties and rather pretty, in a ripe, ponderous way. Even in her apron dress, there was something attractive about her. I’d often wanted to ask her where her husband was. Had he been killed in combat or taken prisoner? All I found out was that Valie had worked as a nurse before the war. She knew a few things about bones.

  She wasn’t worried about my right leg. The break in my femur had been clean and was healing normally. In my left leg, however, both bones had been splintered, and my calf was a mess. Valie cleaned the open wounds and put the broken parts back together. So far, there had been no infection. But whether the leg was growing back together in the correct position, she couldn’t say.

  The wood and bandages I was wrapped with began to smell. She changed the splints. I hardly felt anything. Except for a few bruises, my left arm was almost healed, so I could eat and leaf through the school atlas reasonably well. The sole hindrance was the bandage on my hand. I’d seen the wound under the dressing only once. Valie prepared me for the shock: my little finger had been torn off at the joint. It must have happened when I skidded off the roof. The skin was beginning to close over the bones. The place itched, but no worse than a wasp sting.

  In the beginning of March, the fever came. At first, the spot under my knee looked like a boil. Then it began to fester. The skin swelled and burst and white fluid came out. Valie cleaned the wound daily with chamomile tea. I was in a lot of pain, and my whole body trembled. My blood raced; I thought I was going to lose my reason. Every time I opened my eyes, time had jumped ahead. I had no dreams, except one.

  It began on a slope, where I was riding a bicycle downhill. I was surprised that the bike didn’t find the way down by itself. It was heavy. I looked at it more closely; it was made of pure gold. Immediately, the bicycle turned into a perfectly round crown with large points. With an effort, I pushed it in front of me, farther and farther down the hill. Where to? I thought. What’s down there? Finally, I reached the lowest point, and there was the sea. I understood: The crown had to go into the water. I rolled it on in.

  When I woke up, a word was with me. The word that belonged to the crown. Balleroy. I raised my head. “Balleroy,” I said to the Virgin Mary. She pointed upward.

  When Valie came, I asked her if she knew a town named Balleroy, perhaps a place on the sea. She tried to wipe my forehead and cool my wrists. I warded her off and asked for the atlas. Hesitantly, she opened it to the map of France. I wasn’t strong enough to concentrate very long. Everything got blurry. Soon, I fell asleep.

  The next morning, Valie put a sharp knife in boiling water, took the knife out of the pot with a cloth, bent over my leg, and made an incision below my knee. I screamed. A great deal of liquid matter flowed out of the cut. Valie cleaned the wound with brandy. I lost consciousness.

  After I came to, I asked her to join me in searching the map. She moved the stool beside the bed. We began in the north, on the Belgian border, and traveled south and east along the coast. At frequent intervals, I repeated the name Balleroy. We moved through the départements bordering the English Channel: Pas-de-Calais, Somme, Seine-Maritime, Eure. In Calvados, our fingers passed over the bathing resorts of Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer and Arromanches-les-Bains and investigated the area around Caen and Bayeux. And all at once, just as we were about to move on to Cherbourg, there was the name, right in front of us. Valie put her finger under it, and I said it. It was in small print, but clearly legible: Balleroy.

  It was in Basse-Normandie, much farther from Paris than I had assumed. The road that led there was a very thin line on the map. Somewhere along that road was Chantal’s grandfather’s farm. Maybe you won’t die after all, I said to myself. From that moment on, there was conviction in me.

 
The season of the year added to my confidence. As my infection gradually faded away, spring began. Even in the dark room, where sunlight never stayed long, you could feel nature waking up. I didn’t want to be sick anymore. Something had to change!

  While I was still bedridden, listening to my splints knock together every time I shifted a leg, the trip to Normandy began to take shape in my mind. I could see it so clearly, it seemed as if rue Faillard led directly to the Balleroy road. Valie felt my restlessness and forgave my frequent whining. I was a disagreeable, ill-humored patient who wanted out. I hated lying there, and I tried to get Valie to help me stand up. I asked for my clothes so often, she laid out shirt and trousers on the chair. From now on, they were ready, like a prospect of things to come.

  Valie brought me scissors; my beard hung down to my chest. I cut off clumps of curly hair. When Valie came in with a shaving brush and a razor and went calmly to work, I was certain she’d had a man and shaved him in such a way. Sitting amid beard clippings, I asked her about this.

  “Yes, there was someone,” she said. “But he won’t ever come back.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s far away.” The blade scraped over my cheek.

  “Is he in the war somewhere?”

  “He’s not well.”

  “Wounded?”

  She spoke hesitantly, but her voice was full of longing. “All I know is that Herr Hirschbiegel had to be admitted to a Munich hospital. His wife wrote and told me. That was before the war.”

  Pensively, unhurriedly, Valie told me the story of her love affair with her German gentleman, which had lasted for many years. Since the letter from his wife, Valie had had no further news of him. She didn’t know whether monsieur was still alive.

  I’d attributed many different motives to her, but not this one. While the blade passed over my chin and my throat, Leibold’s phantom, which had always lurked behind Valie, disappeared at last.