As I came alongside, I wondered which table on the terrace of the Brasserie Lorraine had been chosen by the lonely agents of Prosper and if any of the waiters there today, in the same black waistcoats and bow ties as their predecessors, fumbling for coins in the folds of the same white aprons, would have any idea that such events had taken place. How many years did it take to forget? How small was the failing of a school or teacher that its pupils might somehow never learn? The human drive to ignorance, as Professor Putnam had once told her seminar group, is a force as powerful as its opposite – as strong as curiosity itself. For many centuries in almost every country of the world, she told us, the ambition of the village elders was that the next generation should know not less than they themselves; they hadn’t hoped for progress or enlightenment, just that there should be no net loss of knowledge. It had seemed a modest aim when she first explained. Now I was not so sure.
While the days were filled with the words of recorded women, I found much of my spare time taken up by thoughts of a girl in a photograph. In a fanciful way I’d never have admitted to my professional colleagues, I became sure that Clémence had had something to do with the Resistance. I pictured her not as a country girl who’d persuaded her father to shelter an Allied airman for a couple of days or who’d agreed to run a message on her bicycle to the next village. It was more than that. She’d lived in Paris, where she’d been photographed, and her eyes had the look of someone whose knowledge of secrets had lasted a long time. Her colouring suggested that she might have come from the south, near Spain, from Pau or Tarbes, but Paris had obviously been her sphere of operation. Perhaps she was not even French, but had been dropped by SOE parachute. All that mattered for these agents was their ability to pass for French when speaking; nothing else counted, not even their suitability for undercover work.
Studying the photograph in my book, I thought Clémence looked a little like a true-life figure of the Resistance: Andrée Borrel, a young Frenchwoman who on her first SOE assignment found herself sharing several weeks of dangerous activity with Francis Suttill, the English leader of the Prosper circuit. Afterwards, exhausted by all they had gone through together, Suttill sent a message to London to express his gratitude for this exceptional woman. ‘She is the best of us all … Thank you very much for having sent her to me.’
There was no life of Andrée Borrel, though she appeared as a minor character in the biographies of others. It was difficult to find out much about her. The British secret services had been reluctant to give information, refusing even to release the letters she had written to her sister from prison outside Paris, while the French didn’t include her in their pantheon of Resistance heroines because she’d worked for a British organisation.
At the Jean Molland the next day, I decided to finish the Mathilde Masson story, which, distracted by other witnesses, I had temporarily put to one side. At the start of the next file, Mathilde’s voice still had the slower rhythm that had made her easier to understand when she first talked about Armand.
It was in the autumn of that year, 1943, that things started to go wrong. Armand cancelled our evening out two weeks running. The first time he was polite and said he’d been kept late at work. The second time he said he’d had to stay at home and look after his mother.
The third time Armand cancelled, I went to see Louise, and when she’d finished work we went to the Victor Hugo for a drink. It was crowded in there and Louise seemed to know quite a lot of the customers. I didn’t see the proprietor, but a couple of men were joking and calling out to Louise across the room. She seemed to enjoy it and shouted back something rude.
I said I was worried about Armand, and Louise said she’d heard he’d fallen in with some bad people. That was the thing about Louise, she seemed to know everything that was going on. It was not like Armand to let me down, I said, because he’d always made such a fuss of me. Louise squeezed my hand and told me not to worry.
Over the next few weeks I became certain that Armand was working for the Resistance, though I didn’t really know what that meant. There were a lot of people in Paris now who were not so sure the Germans were going to win after all. They talked about a battle at Stalingrad, where the Germans had lost a million men. And then, what with the Americans joining in and everything, it was looking different. Quite a few of the girls I knew who’d been flirting with the German soldiers outside bars and cafés now walked past them with their noses in the air.
So I thought I should find out what Armand was up to. When we next met, I decided to ask him straight out. It was on a Sunday and we’d gone for a walk in the Tuileries, which was a change from the Buttes-Chaumont. A lot of the earth had been dug up and planted with vegetables. We sat on a bench and Armand opened a little tin box. He said he’d managed to get hold of some nice cheese through a friend who knew people in Normandy. Before I could ask him, he said, ‘Mathilde, I’ve got something to tell you, but you must promise to keep it secret.’ Then he told me he was part of a group who were helping send messages to London. All over France, he said, there were people being armed for the battles against the Germans that would be coming soon. Apparently Armand could remember all these code names and addresses and map references without writing them down, which would have been dangerous. It made me feel proud of him that he was so clever, though I suppose no one was going to ask him to use a gun with his short sight.
Then he said, ‘What we do now will make a difference for the rest of our lives. When we’re old we have to know that we were on the right side.’
I remember looking along the gravel paths of the Tuileries when he’d stopped speaking and wondering what all the people there were hiding in their hearts. The ladies with the prams and the old men and the youngsters without a care, what they really thought. I saw a bride in her wedding dress posing for a photograph with her husband behind some trees.
Armand was very worked up. I didn’t know anything about the politics, but I could see how much it meant to him. I didn’t want to end up on the wrong side when we were old, so I said, ‘Is there anything I can do?’ And he said, ‘Nothing yet.’
That must have been in October. I remember it was still sunny in the Tuileries. Then a bit later Louise told me she’d heard something else about Armand. He’d been spending a lot of time with his new friends. And someone at the Victor Hugo had told Louise that they’d seen him with a woman. They weren’t doing anything wrong. They were sitting in a café, close together. But his hand had been on her thigh. They were whispering. And Louise said, ‘Well, were they talking about parachutes and guns or were they whispering other things?’
She didn’t say this to make me jealous, though she must have known it would. She knew how I felt about Armand. I asked her how her friend knew all about him and she said, ‘Everyone spies on everyone these days. Haven’t you noticed?’
I think for the first time in my life I was really angry with Louise. I suppose it ought to have been Armand I was angry with, but it wasn’t. I turned on her and said, ‘I wouldn’t trust any of the men you spend time with.’
We’d never talked about that before. There were tears in her eyes. She said, ‘Don’t be like that, Mathilde, I’m just trying to warn you.’
But I was angry and I said, ‘I’m not having some bitch open her legs for him.’
Louise looked shocked and I began to laugh at her. I was so upset. ‘You of all people. To be shocked,’ I said. ‘You and your special favours in the upstairs room.’
Then Louise wiped her eyes and looked at me and said, ‘You know why I do it?’
I said, ‘Is it money?’
And she said, ‘No, I do it because I want to. I do it because it stops me feeling lonely.’
I paused the recording and sat back in the chair.
In my mind I could picture the Belleville apartment where Mathilde had grown up and where, presumably, she and Louise still lived at this point in their lives – unless one of Louise’s gentlemen friends had found her a room. I could pic
ture the lazy stockpot and the smell of meat cooking (even if Papa had retired by now he’d still have friends in the slaughterhouse). Now, in 1943, there’d be damp clothes hung up about the place to dry, near the stove or the open kitchen window where as a child Mathilde had looked over the lives of the neighbours. And Papa resting his stump on a chair, glass in hand. Was old Madame Gauthier still stopping outside to call upstairs to her cat? Presumably she’d died a pauper’s death by now.
I imagined the bare boards of the landing and the grudged wattage of the hanging bulb. Living on top of other people in this way, sharing a bed with her sister for much of her life, how had Louise managed to feel so lonely that she had to sleep with men for money?
The closeness of other people who were fond of her hadn’t been enough. She had needed more. She’d wanted to be known, known intimately, as herself, for herself – even for a short time, even if it meant being known by a stranger.
Eleven
Sèvres–Babylone
At first I thought Clémence had invented the whole thing. But then I looked it up online and I discovered that the round-up at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the big cycle track near the Quai de Grenelle, was a famous incident when the Germans were in control of Paris during the Second World War. The bronze memorial I’d seen on the quay that cold afternoon was a tribute, a bit late in the day (fifty-three years, I reckoned), to the 13,000 people who’d been held there before being packed off to an unfinished housing project in the northern suburbs at a place called Drancy and from there in trains to be murdered by the Nazis in Poland. The glass roof of the velodrome had previously been painted blue to put off British bombers, and before the round-up began the windows of the lavatories were screwed shut by the Paris police to prevent escape. The French plan, Operation Spring Breeze, was to arrest a total of 28,000 people to meet the needs of a German ‘quota’. It wasn’t ‘spring’, though, it was July, there was no breeze and it was like a greenhouse in the velodrome, with no sanitation. There was dysentery. And of the 13,000 only 400 came back from the death camp.
Up at Paname Fried Poulet, I asked Hasim and Jamal if they knew anything about it. They didn’t. But Hasim told me about the thousands in Algiers who’d ‘disappeared’ in the course of the war against France – not just people who’d died in the fighting, but political prisoners who’d been made to vanish by the French authorities. I suppose you only know about the bad things that have happened to your own people. He mentioned massacres.
It must have been a couple of days after this, while we were working in the kitchen, that Jamal asked me if I’d ever read the Koran. This was awkward. I was wary of him after what he’d told me about his childhood in the camp, but I liked him and had never thought to ask if he was religious.
‘Not since I was a kid,’ I said. ‘I used to go to the mosque a bit. There were classes. But my mother was Christian, I think, so …’
He went to the spice cupboard and handed me a dog-eared book. ‘You can have this copy. It’s in French.’
‘Have you read it, Jamal?’
‘Me? No. I’m not a believer. I don’t need religion to know what I think. I don’t need a god to hate this country, I just need to remember what they did to us.’
‘So if it’s just the same old war between our people and the French, why do the jihadis always talk about religion? Why do they need religion as well?’
I never did hear Jamal’s answer to this question because at that moment Hasim came into the kitchen, and for the first time since I’d known him he was smiling. Someone he knew in Algeria, a cousin with money, was thinking about opening up a restaurant in Paris – not in the banlieue, but somewhere in the middle of the city. His idea was to bring fast food to the smart areas, where he could charge more for it. Although it was really not for me to say, I was just the kitchen slave, I didn’t think ladies shopping for handbags in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré would want to eat burgers and kebabs.
‘That’s not true,’ said Hasim. ‘There’s a McDonald’s in the Champs-Élysées.’
He had a point. As a matter of fact, there was also a Subway with a back entrance onto the respectable street where Clémence lived.
Jamal coughed and wiped his lips. ‘Listen, Boss, those chains have American millions behind them.’
Hasim was not deterred. ‘I like the sound of this Marais place,’ he said. ‘It’s fashionable. Lots of tourists. They could start a shop there. Take a short lease and see how it goes.’
‘It’s full of Jews, the Marais,’ said Jamal. ‘Jews and falafel.’
I opened up the latest sack of frozen chicken bits from Transylvania and began to thaw them in the oven while Hasim and Jamal carried on arguing. After a few minutes they began to swear at each other – your mother this, your sister the other. Jamal was against the whole thing on any grounds – religious, financial, anything he could shout about – though it was really none of his business.
And then I had a brainwave. It seemed to me the reason both these tough men were frightened was that neither of them had ever been into the middle of Paris. They’d lived their whole life in the medina that was Saint-Denis – at night in a cité tower, dodging past the robbers and the drug gangs, and by day in the sweatshop of PFP. They were afraid that if they took the Métro and hopped off at Filles du Calvaire they’d be arrested for looking suspicious. Whereas, despite what I’d said to Sandrine about people’s prejudices, I didn’t care. Perhaps because I was young, or just visiting, or both.
‘Would you like me to look around for you?’ I said. ‘My favourite restaurant’s not far from the Marais. I could walk over and maybe ask a few people who have small shops how much they pay for rent and that kind of thing.’
This made both men forget for a moment whether Hasim’s mother had been a one-eyed whore and turn on me. In the same way I’m not shy of strangers, I don’t take abuse too personally. Maybe I’d got used to it from my father when I was a kid. In any case, by the time it had all died down I’d pretty much got the go-ahead.
Meanwhile, back in Butte-aux-Cailles, things seemed to be going fine as far as Hannah was concerned. She still hadn’t asked for any rent, but I left money on the kitchen table alongside the occasional bunch of bananas or a big pot of the yoghurt I knew she liked. I was earning about fifty euros a day at PFP and only needed ten or so for food, so I usually left twenty for Hannah. Nothing was said between us, but it seemed to work okay.
She also asked me if I’d translate something for her. It was an audio file she’d downloaded on to her laptop, so I had to wait till she’d finished using it and gone to bed one night. There was no password or anything on her machine and I resisted a temptation to open her browsing history. What would a middle-aged American search for anyway? Bottomless Coke and fries? No, she didn’t like that stuff. Hot Tanjawi guys with huge … No, certainly not that. Historicalbackwaters.com. Possibly. Lipmoisturisersupermart.com. Yes, that would account for most of it, I thought. But I honestly didn’t go there. I hovered, but I didn’t.
The audio file was a recording of an old woman with a trembly voice. Her name was Juliette Lemaire, and I remembered she was the one who lived where Stalingrad now was. The sound quality was shit. It took me till about three in the morning to transcribe the whole thing, but this is what old Juliette said.
A few months later the German officer, Major Richter, came back into the shop, this time on his own. He was very polite towards me and Sophie and he bought a fine woollen jacket for his wife. The Germans were always buying things, not just from shops like us but even from the flea market at Clignancourt. We still had things they couldn’t get at home, which was funny when you think about it. I found out later it was all to do with the German economy and inflation. Their shops had been bare for years.
As he was leaving, he asked if I’d think again about having dinner with him. He told me the name of a smart restaurant near the Opéra which of course I couldn’t dream of going to. For some reason I said I’d think about it.
/> He said, ‘When will you decide, Mademoiselle?’ And I said I’d tell him if he came back at the end of the week. He said he had to go to some training school, to lecture there, but would look in again the following week.
There were no rules about this kind of thing. I knew girls who’d let the German soldiers buy them drinks all night in the cafés round Pigalle and sleep with them if they felt there was something in it for them. And there were smart ladies who sat on the terrace of the Colisée on the Champs-Élysées and allowed the German officers to buy them cocktails and dinners and maybe didn’t go to bed with them. I don’t know. But Sophie and I used to think they all had their price.
I wasn’t going to sleep with Klaus Richter. He was married, he was German, he was twice my age. I was a young girl with no money and I’d never slept with anyone because my parents were quite religious and wanted me to marry someone who’d look after me and that wouldn’t happen if I’d slept with men before marriage. So that wasn’t the problem. But there was something about Klaus Richter that I really did like. He was kind and he had such a sad face. But then again I didn’t want to lead him on, I didn’t want him to expect anything.
We had a long talk about it at home. Everyone had to make their own choices and of course most of these decisions weren’t about sleeping with the soldiers, they were just about saying good morning or stepping aside on the pavement or whether you made a point of not reading newspapers you knew were run by the Germans. But everything was run by them really, so everyone went along to some extent. You couldn’t be a hermit.
Paris Echo Page 13