April in Paris

by Michael Wallner

  She gave me back my real face. At my insistence, she brought a mirror. It was a ghastly sight. The SS corporals’ techniques had fixed my jaw so that it hung down sideways. My lower teeth were exposed, the gaps between them clearly visible. They’d broken my nose; the smooth, narrow ridge was now a bumpy outcrop. I must have injured my neck when I fell—I had a scar from my ear to my collarbone. In many spots on my skull, the hair had been replaced by scabs; sparse tufts were growing back here and there. I’d lost weight, my forehead was deeply lined, and purple bags hung down under my eyes. My twenty-third birthday wasn’t far off. But the person gazing at me from the mirror looked a lot older than that.

  We took the splint off my right leg. The break had to be healed by now. I pushed my leg off the bed, laid my arm around Valie’s shoulders, set my foot on the floor, and stood up. I’d figured on being very weak, but the truth was horrifying. My leg folded up like a lifeless piece of meat. I sensed the floor tile under the ball of my foot and felt my knee bend, but the leg was useless. I almost fell over. Valie held me up. She began hauling me around the room. The still-splinted leg served as a support; I dragged the other one along. We went in a circle. I was much too heavy for her, and soon she was breathing hard. After a few minutes, she dragged me back to the bed. I was despondent at the thought that I’d have to stay there several more weeks.

  I asked Valie for other books, and she promised to get me some. That very evening, she brought me a German novel. It looked familiar. After some hemming and hawing, she admitted to having taken the book from Hirschbiegel’s flat. She had a key.

  “You mean I could use it, too?” I asked enthusiastically.

  “What’s the matter, you don’t like my place anymore, boche?” It was the first time she’d used the word as a slur.

  32

  Many weeks had passed since I’d fallen from the roof into Valie’s keeping. I was a shattered man, and she nursed me; I was a wanted man, and she hid me. How could I repay her? One evening, leafing through the atlas again, I noticed a page had come away from the binding. It was of the South Pacific and Oceania, detached from the rest of the world. For several minutes, I studied islands with such names as Onotoa or Nanumaga and ran my finger along the perimeter of the Fiji Basin. I followed the trace of the international date line, east of which it was always a day later than it was west of the line. Eventually, I picked up the loose page, smoothed it, and began to fold it. I had to destroy my creation twice, but on the third try, I succeeded in making a bird. Both of its wings were blue. Its head was formed by the New Zealand coastline; the Gilbert Islands decorated its tail. I wrote “For Valie” on its underside and waited for evening to come.

  “A farewell gift?” she asked.

  I was eating bean stew. She sat on the stool next to the bed and looked at the paper creature in her lap.

  “How do you expect to make it?” My bird, like a swan unfit for flight, flew awkwardly from her hand.

  “The way I’ve made it up to now,” I replied, hastening over the route in my mind.

  Landscapes in the first flush of spring. Trees laden with blooms, the green haze over the fields. It was the end of March. I knew they’d assigned a quarter of a million men to the reinforcement of the Atlantic Wall. Ten bunkers per kilometer of shoreline. Dunkerque, Le Havre, Cherbourg, Saint-Malo, Brest, and the Channel Islands had been declared “fortresses.” Panzer units, assault-gun units, and tank-destroyer units had moved in. Most of the soldiers were stationed in the very region I intended to cross.

  On a crutch, alone, without money or papers. Searching for Chantal.

  Valie thanked me and left the room. I lay awake all night long, imagining what would happen. I hoped Chantal could hear me.

  The splint was bound tightly to my lower leg, over my trousers. We embraced; I patted Valie’s warm back and felt the deep breath of the woman to whom I owed my life. It was unlikely that we’d ever see each other again. And yet Valie and I spoke about a time “afterward” and made a plan to meet when everything was over. With the crutch jammed into my armpit, I opened the door. We didn’t kiss. As I hobbled out onto rue Faillard, the wooden shafts made loud stumping sounds on the pavement.

  I slipped out of the city by the morning light, in a group of about a hundred men on their way to join a labor deployment. Once I was past the Bois, I hitched a ride in a vegetable truck. The driver asked no questions. I was wearing a brown suit and shoes with hobnailed soles, because Valie had assumed that I’d have to travel most of the way on foot. She’d even managed to rustle up a coat for me.

  Luck abandoned me after Poissy. A cloudburst made the road, which German tanks had turned into a gravelly wasteland, impassable; the truck got stuck. The driver and I tried using boards to give the vehicle some traction. That was how I ruined my suit the first day I wore it. When the rain slackened, the vegetable man set out for the village to fetch a yoke of oxen. We bade each other farewell, and I continued my journey on foot. I hadn’t managed to travel very far from Paris.

  The crutch sank into the muddy ground. I spent the first night by a stream, in the shelter of a willow grove. I drank water and ate some of the provisions that Valie had packed for me. Even though I was cold, it was an amazing experience to lie on the ground under a stormy sky after weeks cooped up in a back room. I closed my eyes euphorically and tried to recall what I knew about edible plants and mushrooms and berries, until it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to find anything of that sort in early April. All the same, I knew I’d reach Balleroy in the end, no matter how long it took. I imagined Chantal’s surprise, her happiness. I’d wait with her for the end of the war, work in the fields, and help with the harvests until we could begin our new lives.

  The next morning, endless columns of troop carriers came rolling down the road. None of the men in the flatbed trucks paid any attention to the cripple on the roadside. Nevertheless, I decided that from now on I’d travel only on cross-field paths and cart tracks. For reference, I’d torn the map of northern France out of the atlas.

  On the second evening, in a village named Thière, I determined that I’d covered only a few kilometers, and that I’d gone too far to the south. Exhausted and discouraged, I crawled into a barn, lay down on my coat, and piled hay on myself. I awoke freezing in the dark, pulled on my coat, and burrowed deeper into the hay.

  The weather changed. It became clammy and capricious, and the nights were frigid. If I slept outside, in the morning my suit was covered with frost. I’d gone through all my victuals in three days. I didn’t like the idea of stealing.

  In those days, there were lots of dubious riffraff on the roads, people like me. Wherever I went, I encountered suspicion. No one invited me to share a meal or voluntarily provided me with a place to spend the night. After making the acquaintance of my third farm dog, which pursued me to the end of its chain, I started simply taking what I needed—stealing chunks of stale bread from horse troughs, tearing the first spring onions out of the earth and eating them raw. Sometimes I roasted bread and onions together on a wooden spit. Once a farmer smelled my campfire and ran me off with a couple of shotgun blasts. By that time, I was able to hump along on my crutch so nimbly that not even men with two healthy legs could keep up with me.

  I’d never milked a cow in my life. After a few tries, I was able to do it even in the dark. I knew how to soothe the beasts and how to avoid their hooves. When a whole farmstead was asleep, I’d sneak into the chicken coop and steal the hens’ eggs. One night, I even dared to climb into an open farmhouse window. I unbolted the smoking chamber and grabbed a chunk of bacon. The farmer’s dog started yapping so close beside me that I dropped the bacon and ran off. Afterward, I was angry with myself. What was a bite on the leg compared with the enjoyment of some tasty pork belly?

  After a particularly frigid night—I’d been on the road for nearly three weeks by then—I woke up with chills and fever, which forced me to remain all th
at day on my back in the hay. I had to wait there for three days, which meant three days without any nourishment. On the fourth morning, I woke up well again. Feeling the spring in my limbs, I clambered down from the hayloft and went outside to warm myself in the sun.

  Since there was no longer any doubt that the Allies would invade, the Germans weren’t concentrating so hard on the enemy within. Most matters between the French and the occupying forces sorted themselves out. The reciprocal moratorium was broken only by partisan attacks and the reprisals that followed them. I hadn’t seen any firing-squad executions myself, but a baker’s wife told me the story of an entire hamlet whose population was exterminated because two German soldiers on a motorcycle had been blown up.

  I continued to avoid fortified roads. I’d assumed I wouldn’t meet the first units until I got close to the sea, and I was surprised by the colossal scale of the troop movements that were taking place. I saw tanker trucks for panzer divisions, personnel carriers, and armored tank transports loaded with steel scaffolding a meter long. I passed freshly leveled roads, saw bridges that had been blown up to impede the enemy’s advance into the interior. Hobbling on my crutch, I skirted fields mined by German sappers and circumvented checkpoints, if I noticed them in time. I luckily got past one by shouldering my crutch like a shovel and joining a work gang.

  Near a place called Heudebouville, I investigated a solitary farm. I caught only a brief glimpse of part of the family: an older farm couple, five or six children, two farmworkers. Farming people almost always went to bed with the chickens, but there the lights stayed on long after nightfall. I gazed at them from my observation post behind a tree and heartily wished I’d be able to crawl into the hay soon. The dog was a blustery old woofer who barked for no reason. His people hardly paid him any attention.

  Finally, the last window grew dark. I crept to the barn door and opened it just wide enough to slip through. The dog whimpered. I climbed a ladder to the threshing floor, spread out my coat, and covered myself with as much hay as I could reach. My eyes closed at once.

  The sky was dark. Shouts woke me up, but I didn’t understand the language right away. Just as I was crawling toward the wooden wall, the racket began. A breaking window. Footsteps and screams in the house. Somewhere a door was smashed in. Crying children, scolding voices. Through an opening in the wall, I saw torches and flashlights. There was a shot and a pitiful outcry. Beams of light playing over the straw, flickering dust particles, torn from the darkness. More shouts.

  “Here’s another one!”

  A leather coat, a gray cap. I was wide awake and dazed at the same time. Unable to move, I had but one thought: Gestapo.

  “Down the ladder.” The language the man spoke wasn’t German; it was the local dialect. His pistol was an old model. When I reached for my crutch, he fired. I cried out in mortal fright and pointed to the splint on my leg. The man found the crutch and threw it to the floor below. I limped to the ladder, climbed down carefully, and stepped into the open. I’d forgotten my coat.

  Standing at the barn gate, I could see ten men, Frenchmen, driving the family together. Flames leapt up behind a window. The grandmother and the farmer’s wife were with the small children; the older boys, intimidated and half-asleep, pressed around the father. One of the workers squatted down, looking dazed; the other was just being brought in. I couldn’t completely shake off my sleepiness, and I felt a sickly, debilitating fear. I was shoved forward, hands clasped behind my head. I didn’t understand what was happening. The armed men were French; their regional speech was the same as the farmers’.

  The big farmer, wearing underpants and a fleece jacket, was led to the manure pile. An order was bawled out; two soldiers aimed and fired. The women’s screams came as though from one throat. While the victim’s heavy body was still sinking to the ground, his father was brought in. He clambered stiff-legged over his son’s corpse. The women stopped screaming; the children stood and gaped wide-eyed. The elderly man expired with a sigh. Next it was the older worker’s turn. He fought and bellowed. A bullet struck him in the temple.

  Now the man in the cap shoved me toward the manure heap. As my hands were still raised, I lost my balance and fell. On the ground, I found the smell of the dung surprisingly intense. I was pulled to my feet and hustled past the women. Looks of amazement—nobody knew me. There was hardly room to stand among the dead. Not a sound. I turned around and tried to speak, but all I managed to get out was a croak. The other farmworker was hauled up at my side. In the torchlight, three men aimed their weapons. I saw an outstretched hand pointing at the man next to me. His muscles tensed. When I heard the shot, the worker was already sinking down, his hand raised as though in defense. The whispering sound was my own breath. Everything was silent. They reloaded and raised the rifle butts to their shoulders.

  “No,” someone said.

  He was young. His shirt had a torn collar; and he was the only one not carrying a weapon. He took a few steps toward me but didn’t climb over the bodies. He was hardly older than I was; his eyeglasses gave him a winsome look. He looked me up and down.

  “You’re not from around here,” he said.

  “No.” I looked back at him.

  “Who are you?”

  “They burned down my village,” I said softly.

  “Where?”

  Everyone waited for my answer. It would determine whether I lived or died. Someone had told me the name of a place the Germans had destroyed. I couldn’t think of it. I let my hands fall, staggering on my injured leg.

  “What’s the name of the village?” he asked without impatience.

  I let my head droop; I simply couldn’t say anything. I started to cry. Two men came up, escorting the farmer’s oldest son.

  “These are traitors,” the man with the glasses said, as though I had the right to an explanation before the execution was carried out. “Collaborators. Also informers, and therefore sentenced to death.”

  He made sure I had understood. Then, in conclusion, he said, “I’m the commander of the Libération Normandie brigade,” and went back to his men. They took aim. One of the men who had escorted the youngster was standing right next to me. I noticed the shadow of a rifle butt. It caught me behind the ear. The torch.

  Everything was still. I moved my legs. My head felt as though it had been rammed down into my body. I lifted my shoulders. Day was dawning. I felt the back of my head. Clotted blood. I was lying not far from the manure pile.

  The men were gone; the corpses had disappeared. Dark splashes on the whitewashed wall, pools on the ground. Near the straw, a bit of fabric from someone’s clothes. I looked over the enclosure of the liquid manure pit. The farm was deserted, the fire burned out. It cost me an interminable effort to get to my feet. I shuffled over to the house, not thinking about my crutch. Unable to find a living soul, I sank down and leaned against the door frame. I was cold, and I didn’t know what had become of my coat. After a few minutes, I stood up again and got out of there. A ringing in my ears accompanied every step. I tried to keep my head still.

  Execution, I thought. They weren’t Germans. A family feud? A name came to me: Libération Normandie. The man with the eyeglasses belonged to the Resistance. Like Chantal. I reached the farm gate, which hung askew, took my first step onto the dirt road, and heard the whimpering. There was the dog, dragging his chain in the dust. He ran back and forth, always to the end of the chain, barking as he ran, then snuffing and yapping; he wouldn’t stop running. For a moment, I held on to the post. The dog was old, but I didn’t trust him. I hobbled over to the lean-to, where the other end of his chain was fastened. Four bolts driven through a metal plate. I couldn’t loosen the chain. Then I noticed the mound. A rectangle of freshly shoveled earth. In the grass, not far away, a woman’s jacket. The faces of the people lying under the mound appeared before me, farmers’ faces in torchlight. The powerful father, the workers. The youngest son was n
o more than ten. I turned away.

  When I walked over to the dog, he barked and backed up until he couldn’t go any farther. I bent over. Hammering inside my skull. I reached for the dog’s collar and unfastened the buckle. The chain fell to the ground. The dog stayed where he was. I straightened up slowly and didn’t look at the fresh mound again. Libération. For the second time, I reached the gate. Pink stripes on the horizon; the little road led that way. I walked without a crutch, flapping an arm to maintain my balance. The dog stood at the gate. I hoped he’d come with me. He stayed where his people were buried. I heard him barking for a long time.

  33

  The farm faced south. The hill rose to the horizon, where a weathered bench under an ash tree promised a lovely view. The property had been described to me. I approached it with the sweeping gait I’d adopted since losing my crutch.

  It was Sunday; no one in the fields. Some folks in their best outfits on the dusty road. The church apparently lay behind the hill. Although I knew the sea was many kilometers away, I kept waiting to see breakers from the top of the next rise or the one after that. I laughed. I felt afraid. I imagined walking with Chantal on the seashore, saw her naked feet in the sand. Not too fast, I said to myself. Be careful. You’re going to fall. Slow down! I considered looking for something that might serve as a walking stick, because I didn’t seem capable of holding myself back. I started going even faster, running up the hill, waving both arms around to stay upright. An elderly couple dressed in Sunday black turned around. I was ragged and unshaven, and by this time my leg splints were just two clattering pieces of wood. My jaw was healing badly, and my mouth always hung open a little. I wasn’t worried about it. I laughed louder and ran so fast, my eyes got blurry. A bell rang somewhere. People were cresting the hill. I thought the Mass must be over.