Tariq was in my thoughts because of Leo Busch’s warning that Mathilde was hard to understand. Given my problems with spoken French, I thought I was sure to struggle. I could have asked Julian to go with me, but although his French was better than mine he was not a native speaker; his understanding didn’t seem as instinctive as Tariq’s. I was in any case reluctant to let Julian see me at work. Over the years I’d developed one or two ways of winning the confidence of people and I didn’t want him to tease me about them afterwards.
With Tariq, it was different. He wouldn’t notice anything. He wouldn’t know which number world war it was, why the Germans were in Paris or why most French people tolerated them, having changed their tune from 1940’s ‘sales Boches’, ‘filthy Germans’, to 1942’s ‘sales anglais’, ‘filthy English’. He’d probably be looking at the screen of his cell phone while Mathilde talked, but it would be a comfort to have him there.
The appointment was made by Leo Busch for the following Thursday afternoon. Mathilde lived near the Place des Fêtes, on Line Seven bis, a loop attached to the regular Line Seven; she’d be expecting me and ‘a colleague’ at four o’clock.
When the day came, a breezy morning in May, one of those days when the world seems bright again, I wasn’t feeling at my best. Aleksandr, for a long time dormant in some zombie hinterland, had burst into my dreams the night before and left me shaken, as he could, for many hours (it was sometimes days) to come.
I couldn’t allow him to derail my work at this moment, so I had to confront, for a moment at least, the power he still wielded: I had to face him down. But at once my mind began to wander … Suppose there were 6 billion people in the world, 3 billion of each sex. Of these perhaps 1 billion were over fifty and 1 billion under twenty-two. So I had 1 billion potential mates! Allowing for the fact that many of them wouldn’t like me at all, and being as choosy as a reasonably sane and halfway friendly person might be, could you narrow it down to, say, one in a hundred of that group? Picky or what. But even that still left (I checked the math on a piece of paper) 100 million attractive men I could have had an okay life with. (My guess, only a guess, was that few women in fact narrowed it down that far; many were content with number 567,297,441.) But anyone in your top 50 million was going to lead to something dangerous. Then, suppose by the most unlikely chance you came across a man in your top million or thousand or hundred. What then was the capacity for pain? And what, dear God, if he was in your earthly, conceivable top ten? I hardly dared to picture Number One himself. At that moment he was probably chopping trees in a Venezuelan jungle in a loincloth and a sweaty headband, unaware of his appalling power.
When I’d finished this calculation, I felt better. I even smiled. But then I saw the strangeness of my logic. I hadn’t for a moment thought the narrowing odds would bring me happiness as I came closer to the other half of me. No. I’d assumed that the person I most loved would most utterly destroy me. And what, as my therapist might have asked in her hot Boston consulting room, does that say about you, Hannah?
At one o’clock I went out to a local café and had the dish of the day – ‘Le dos de cabillaud, Madame? Bien sûr’ – and, for the first time on my own, a lunchtime glass of wine. The cod was good, but the wine made me feel hazy, so I had an espresso and went back to the apartment to find Tariq. It had been easy to enlist his help and he took obvious pleasure in planning the Métro trip.
‘I’ve never been on the Seven bis,’ he said excitedly; and while the train rattled along I saw his brown eyes staring first at himself in the reflection opposite, where his face was elongated by the glass, then at the advertisements in the stations where we stopped. I suppose it was just a boy thing, a male thing, but I envied his self-absorption. He was either admiring himself or thinking of his next pleasure. In my own head I barely seemed capable of seeing anything for what it was any longer. Everything seemed connected to, or shaped by, something else – to an incident long ago, to wider meaning or significance: to history and loss.
I could feel a headache starting up in the usual place behind my temples and I was afraid that the meeting with Mathilde mattered too much to me. I’d already done enough work to provide a draft chapter for Barbara Putnam’s book, so it was not anxiety about the professional outcome of the interview that was troubling me. What was making my head hurt was the fact that I felt answerable to these women. It was up to me to discover and put right whatever might have happened to betrayed Simone; only I could forgive Mathilde for what she’d done, because only I understood the extenuating facts of her life. And then there were the others I’d come across, like the admired Andrée Borrel; or those I’d perhaps imagined, like Clémence; and it was for the stressed machinery in my brain to redeem their deaths and give them a better chance in some hypothetical second life.
The Place des Fêtes, Party Square, almost at the end of the line, was anything but festive. Tower blocks with orange and tan paintwork were ranged around the sloping square – a pedestrianised area with a dirty glass pyramid, a handful of tubed saplings and a shuttered carousel.
‘My God,’ I said, struck by a spasm of guilt. ‘We must buy some flowers for Mathilde. I’d quite forgotten.’
‘There’s a Monoprix over there,’ said Tariq.
‘No, I think we can do better,’ I said. I wanted time to gather myself. On one side of the square was an alleyway with a bazaar that sold household goods; next to it was a florist with pot plants and some old tulips. At the back of the shop I unearthed something fresher, a bouquet tied with straw.
‘Are you all right?’ said Tariq, as I fumbled with the coins.
‘Yes, I’m fine. I’m just going to get some water to drink. Can you hold on to these?’
Tariq’s cell phone guided us to Mathilde’s block and we went through the street doors. Inside, it was like a run-down hospital, the walls gunmetal grey in whorled, unfinished plaster.
‘I’m surprised there’s no security code,’ I said as we walked past rows of mailboxes to the lifts.
‘It won’t start till later,’ said Tariq. ‘It was seven at the Olympiades.’ How come this kid knew more than I did? Street wisdom – something else for me to learn.
The elevator was larger than in most Paris buildings, part of the design, not squeezed up later through a stairwell. The doors shuddered open on the twelfth floor, where a diagram showed the way to apartment 1206. The ceiling was low above our heads and the windowless way was lit by sodium wall lights.
‘Here,’ said Tariq, pointing to a number on the wall, beside a grey door.
I lifted my hand, then hesitated.
‘What?’ said Tariq, looking up from his phone.
I knocked. Almost at once I heard shuffling footsteps, then the sound of locks and chains, none of which sounded heavy enough to be effective. As the flimsy door was pulled open, I searched for the living face of my witness. When I saw it at last, it was at a lower level than mine, the figure of Mathilde Masson reaching only to my shoulder. I had a vision of her as a child, standing in her wet dress in the sea, with her father clinging on.
‘Come in, come in.’
We did as we were told and found ourselves in a room with some old brown furniture, among which were a couple of plastic garden chairs.
‘I brought these for you,’ I said, holding out the bouquet.
Mathilde took it with a sound that might have been surprise or gratitude and put it on a hatch that opened on to a small kitchen. There was a blue budgerigar in a cage by the window that overlooked the square far below. The room was warm and airless.
Without waiting to be asked any questions, Mathilde began to speak. Her voice was thinner and harder than on the audio files and she spoke more quickly. I felt thrown. I had a list of questions, beginning with inquiries into Mathilde’s health and how she came to be living in the Place des Fêtes, which was not so very far from the Belleville of her childhood and … But the old woman hadn’t even asked me to sit down before she began to talk. I was still fumbling in my bag for n
otebook and pen.
Mathilde sat in an armchair that seemed to have come from the time of the Occupation itself, though it had a remote control beside it and was lined up on a small television. Since I hadn’t been offered a seat, I perched on the edge of a garden chair and nodded to Tariq to do the same. I was so fascinated by the old woman’s physical presence that I found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying.
Interrupting her story, Mathilde turned to face me. ‘Are you American?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you doing in Paris?’
‘I’m sorry, I thought Professor Busch had explained. I’m writing a chapter for a history book about women in the—’
‘What’s it got to do with America?’
‘Nothing specifically. It’s history. It’s a record, it’s of interest to all people who—’
‘And who’s he?’
‘He’s my colleague, Tariq. I thought Professor—’
‘Is he an Arab?’
‘His home’s in North Africa, I believe.’
Mathilde’s face grew hard. She had smeared lipstick on her mouth and black colour round her eyes, so that with her dyed hair she looked like something from a Weimar nightclub.
The set expression resolved itself at last. ‘I like Arabs,’ said Mathilde. ‘Monsieur Rashid brings up my shopping.’
I didn’t dare look towards Tariq.
‘There’s people from all over the world round here,’ she said. ‘There’s even French people I remember from where I grew up. The Arabs are fine. It’s the Jews I can’t bear.’
‘Madame,’ I said quickly, ‘could I please ask you one or two questions about the Occupation? And perhaps if you could speak quite slowly and remember that I don’t speak French that well.’
‘I thought all Americans were fat,’ said Mathilde.
‘No. Anyway, could I ask you a few questions? You remember you did some recordings for the Centre Jean Molland. Perhaps we could start with those.’
‘I saw a notice in the paper. I thought I could help. I had things to tell them. People told such lies afterwards.’
‘I’ve listened to the recordings. They’re very interesting. What was your parents’ attitude towards the Germans?’
Mathilde considered for a moment, and I felt pleased to have her attention. I’d been embarrassed by what she said about the Jews – not on my own account, because I could handle historical context, but, weirdly enough, on Tariq’s. I didn’t want him to have a bad impression of ‘us’ – Mathilde and me.
‘My father hated the Germans,’ said Mathilde. ‘But my mother quite liked them. She liked their green uniforms and their funny shaved necks. She was a stupid woman. We didn’t see that much of them where we lived. They liked the cafés on the Champs-Élysées. And the Bois de Boulogne. They liked boating on the lake. But why would they come up the rue des Couronnes? There weren’t even any good brothels.’
Once she’d started, Mathilde was able to keep going. Much of it was familiar, but I didn’t want to risk missing some jewel, so I scribbled as fast as I could in my notebook.
‘… ration coupons, but there was nothing to buy with the coupons, so what’s the point of a ticket that says you can have half a loaf of bread if there isn’t any bread in the bakery?’
‘And why did you stay in Paris when so many people left?’
‘Are you crazy? We didn’t have friends in Burgundy. We didn’t have a country manor house! We were peasants. Paris peasants. I’d only ever been out of Paris once in my life, to go to the seaside when we were young. It was a veterans’ association who paid for us to go to—’
‘You talked about it on the recordings.’ I didn’t want Mathilde to waste energy on things I already knew. ‘And would you say that life was harder for women than for men in those four years?’
‘Of course not. The men were either in prisoner-of-war camps or they had to go and work in Germany. We just carried on in the factories like before the Germans came. I still got paid.’
‘So what was your feeling about the Germans? You personally?’
‘I didn’t mind them. I felt sorry for some of the young ones. They didn’t know how to behave, they looked embarrassed. Later in the war it was different. They were older. They’d come back from Russia. They were broken. Like ghosts. No, they were all right, the Germans. It was the English we didn’t like. Because they kept the war dragging on. And the Jews.’
‘Yes, but what about—’
‘And the Russians. The Bolsheviks. We didn’t want them to win the war. Of course.’
‘And the Americans?’ I suddenly couldn’t help asking.
‘We didn’t know anything about the Americans,’ said Mathilde. ‘Until they came parading down our streets when it was all over.’
‘All right. Now if I may, I wanted to ask you about your fiancé, Armand, and his work with the Resistance.’
‘Did I tell them about that? On the recording machine?’
‘Yes, you did. You said quite a lot about Armand and how you planned to get married. Then you told how someone had told your sister, Louise, that he had been seen with another woman who—’
‘That bitch. That filthy whore.’
Well, I’d registered Mathilde’s coarse language on the audio files, but it was somehow a surprise to hear it on the twelfth floor, in person, with the bird looking over from its cage. As Mathilde continued talking, I remembered how she’d said that she and Armand had been lovers – ‘I’d done it, sex, with Armand’ – and as I tried to focus on what she was saying, I looked at her legs in their dark wrinkled nylons and blue rubber clogs and imagined her parting them for Armand in … maybe his parents’ flat when they were out, a room near the Victor Hugo found by Louise or among some bushes in the Buttes-Chaumont … Then I looked at the old woman’s hands with their ropy veins and imagined them caressing her lover, little bespectacled Armand. I felt ashamed of these thoughts, for a moment, but then put my shame down to bad practice. It was really quite all right to picture these things. History was not a pageant; it was real and now.
Mathilde waved her speckled hands in the air and spit gathered in the corners of her mouth. I risked a glance across at Tariq, but he was looking down at the screen of his cell phone, presumably killing goons on it.
‘Could I, please, Madame, ask you to talk a little bit more slowly? Thank you. And do you know what happened to Simone after you reported her to the prefect of police?’
‘She was arrested, I should think. People were arrested all the time.’
‘And then what happened to her?’
‘I don’t know. I expect she had a trial and went to prison.’
‘In France? Or did she go to a concentration camp? In Germany? Or Poland?’
‘How should I know? They wouldn’t have told me, would they?’
‘What about Armand? Did he know what happened to Simone? Did he know it was you who followed him and reported her?’
‘I sent him a note to warn him she was in trouble and that he’d better be careful. I didn’t see him again.’
‘Never?’
‘I saw him once in the street. Twenty years later. He was grey and bald and he had a child with him. A girl of about ten.’
‘Did you speak to him?’
‘No. He saw me and tried to cross the road, but I moved on quickly. I got on a bus. I didn’t want to talk to him.’
‘And you never married.’
‘No.’
‘And what about Louise and Élodie?’
‘Ellie went to live in the suburbs. She had four children, but I hardly saw them. Louise went to live in Marseille with a man she met through her work.’
‘Did she write to you?’
‘Lulu?’ Mathilde smiled for the first time. ‘No, she couldn’t write. But I went down to see her once. Her husband fixed it.’
‘And … Was she all right?’
‘They moved out of the town into a village. They adopted a little boy from Spain. They a
ll came to Paris once. She was … Just the same. She never changed. We went out to a dance hall, the four of us. In Montmartre. She made me dance with her husband while she danced with the Spanish boy. She said, “Come on, Minouche. You can borrow my husband, but make sure you give him back.” Then she whispered in my ear, “He took me a lot of finding,” and we both started laughing.’
Sensing that Mathilde was starting to flag, I looked down at my long list of questions. ‘How do you think the women of Paris managed during those four years? What was the main way in which their experience was different from men’s?’
Something about the way it came out made it sound like a test paper. I found myself blushing. ‘Give examples,’ I might as well have added.
Mathilde snorted. ‘It wasn’t very different for people like us. When you’re poor you just do what you have to do.’
‘But from the history of the—’
‘You only think about the factory. Work. And when you might get time off. But mostly we were thinking about food.’
For a few more minutes Mathilde continued with her rattling reminiscences. She reminded me of the actress, Arletty. Professor Putnam had once played us a recording of her to give an idea of a certain type of Parisienne, of the accent and the attitude known as ‘parigot’. Mathilde, like Arletty, wasn’t interested in shades of righteousness. How difficult it was when contemporary witnesses seemed unaware of the meaning of what they’d lived through – though to me that difficulty was also the most interesting part of it: the way that personal experience shrugged off the judgement of others.
Mathilde’s voice was weakening and she was growing restless in the armchair. I wondered if she needed the bathroom – not that she’d have been shy to say so.
When, reluctantly, I stood up to leave and started to express my thanks, Mathilde said, ‘They gave me a hundred thousand francs for denouncing that slut.’
‘Really?’
‘I didn’t ask for it. They just handed me a piece of paper to sign and then gave me an envelope at the police station.’
‘What did you do with the money?’
‘I bought a hat for Louise. I gave some to my mother for food. The rest I gave to the veterans’ association that had paid for us to go away to the seaside. When I was a child.’
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