Paris Echo

by Sebastian Faulks

  Tariq looked as though he hoped the performance would carry on. But after she’d dabbed some powder on her face, she stood up and turned towards him. She took off the dressing gown and threw it on the bed. She had nothing on beneath it. From the top drawer of a chest she took some stockings and, sitting on the side of the bed, rolled them up her legs, then fastened them to a sort of belt she’d taken from a lower drawer. Tariq looked at how her breasts fell forward as she reached behind her thigh to the back fastening.

  When she was satisfied with the arrangement, she looked towards Tariq and found him still staring.

  He looked down at his feet.

  ‘Come here,’ she said.

  I stood up from the chair and went over to the edge of the bed. Then I knelt down and put my arms round her bare waist, let my hands slide down, under the straps, held her tight and rested my cheek against the hair between her legs.

  For a minute I stayed still, while she stroked my head and spoke softly. I couldn’t make out the words, but I found them calming. She said nothing distinct, kept murmuring, stroking my hair. She began to sing again.

  Sixteen

  Louvre–Rivoli

  Juliette Lemaire had been to dinner with Klaus Richter not once but twice, I discovered. There was nothing underhand or false about Juliette, but there was something close to naïveté that made me feel anxious as I listened to her story in the sound booth.

  Maxim’s restaurant, where German soldiers (or French citizens without scruples) could eat anything they wanted for cash, had been the venue on the first occasion. Juliette had been too nervous to eat, but had listened in fascination as Richter talked about his childhood in a village on the river Tauber near Rothenburg. He told her how he hated it when the Nazis lit on his home as a model of ‘Germanness’, then expelled the Jewish townspeople. ‘That was not the country I’d grown up in, which was one of music and art and high Christianity,’ he told Juliette, as she smuggled a petit four into her handbag. He spoke of Riemenschneider’s wood carvings and the wine so lovely it was unknown outside Franconia because ‘we drank it all ourselves!’ He described how he fell in love with the daughter of a concert pianist in Rothenburg.

  Delivered home to the rue de Tanger by ten o’clock as promised, Juliette sat up with her parents describing the splendour of the room – the gilt-framed mirrors and plush seats – and the food she’d barely touched, including a Bresse chicken with foie gras beneath the skin. Her father had urged her to make a better meal of it if she was asked out again.

  The second dinner, a few weeks later, was in a restaurant near the Opéra, a place with shellfish on ice in the windows. Juliette hadn’t liked it as much as Maxim’s because through the window she could see the Kommandatur, where she and her friends were for ever waiting to have their papers stamped. This time she had managed to eat a little: grilled sole and then some brie. The butter in a small silver dish was the thing she’d loved, more than the wine or the fish or the cheese.

  Juliette’s voice was that of an old woman, but it carried still a sense of youthful doubt, of not knowing whether what she’d done was permitted, overlooked or asking for trouble.

  The second time, I’d taken a lot of care with the way I looked. My mother said I should put my hair up, but that wasn’t my style and I wore it loose. She said my dress was too short, but I said it wasn’t, and anyway I wore a light coat open over the top and new grey stockings I’d got from the shop. I didn’t have an evening bag, so I took my usual one on the long strap, which I wore diagonally across my front. Papa said I looked like a bandit, but I said it was to keep it safe on the Métro. I always wore it like that. I didn’t mind because I felt free and light on my feet.

  Klaus looked very proper in his uniform, clean-shaven, with the grey beginning in the hair above his ears. He was polite to the waiters and friendly to some people he knew at another table. He had clean fingernails and hands that stayed steady when he lit a cigar afterwards. Then, with the coffee, he began to talk more about his wife. He told me they had two boys, but they were too young to be soldiers, thank God. Then he pushed a small package across the table and said it was for me. In it was a pearl necklace with a gold clasp. I’d seen similar things in shop windows in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, but no pearls as pure as this. I thought I could get away with it, for a moment. A single row at the collar under a blouse … No one would know it was expensive.

  But I pushed it back and thanked him. Then I said we shouldn’t meet again. And he told me … things I can hardly bring myself to repeat even now. He said he was in love with me. It sounds ridiculous – a high-up officer and a girl from a shop, and this was only the fourth time we’d met, but maybe he was. He said he’d first seen me coming up the steps at the Louvre Métro station on the rue de Rivoli and followed at a distance to find out where I worked. It had taken him a week to pluck up the courage to come into the shop with his fat friend. This made me like him more. We both began to laugh, but my mind was made up. I was frightened by the feelings he was stirring up in me. I had an urge to kiss him and I was scared of where it might lead.

  He apologised for going too fast. He said, ‘It’s the war, Juliette. We’re living at twice the normal speed.’ He spoke good French with hardly an accent. He said he wouldn’t mention love again if I would just let him see me. Perhaps one Sunday we could go on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne. He said he could arrange for some fresh produce to be delivered to my parents – he mentioned eggs and ham. Outside on the street, he gripped my hands. He pleaded with me, but I was crying by now. Why? Was I frightened of what people might say or think of me? No, I didn’t care about those people scuttling off down into the Métro, each with their own little secrets. I didn’t care what they thought. I was just scared of the feeling inside me.

  We stood there for a moment. Then he took a deep breath and walked over to his car. He gave instructions to the driver and opened the door for me. I let him hug me before I climbed in. I didn’t look back because my face was ugly from crying. All the streets were empty, so it took no time to get home.

  I paused the recording, put down the headphones and looked back over my notes. In my months in Paris, I’d listened to many witnesses, panning for gold, and it had taken me a while to come back to Juliette Lemaire. Although I’d warmed at once to the sound of her contralto voice, I’d also felt there was something flighty about her – this shop girl, this midinette – and thought I was more likely to find hard truths from women like Mathilde Masson, the daughter of Belleville and Verdun.

  I saw now that I’d underestimated Juliette. She’d left school at fourteen, but later began to read books to educate herself; after the war, she’d found a place at some sort of night school. Her aim had been to learn dressmaking, to have her own clothes shop one day, but she’d been sidetracked by the idea of becoming a schoolteacher – an ambition she made good at the age of thirty, by which time she was living in the south of Paris, deliberately far from where she’d started out.

  Over the years, I’d gained a sense of when I was in the presence of true witness. A lack of emotion was a good sign, as was an ability to live with contradictions – a willingness just to report experience and leave the judgement to others. And Juliette Lemaire was perhaps after all the one I’d been looking for – well balanced, unafraid and present in the capital at all important times.

  I restarted the recording in the summer of 1944, the days of the Liberation. Juliette hadn’t joined in the euphoria that most people felt. She’d seen fighting at the École Militaire, as Free French units fired on Vichy recruits inside, leaving the walls marked by bullet holes. There were certainly plenty of people in Paris who, although they’d done nothing to express it, had opposed the Occupation and envied their country cousins – people who’d been able to make real gestures of support in haylofts, bicycles, messages and so on. For the frustrated résistants in Paris, long-held resentments became violence in the streets. But most of the people Juliette knew were not like that: they�
��d supported Marshal Pétain until a few weeks earlier. She found it hard to understand how so many of them went to cheer General de Gaulle on his march down the Champs-Élysées; none of the general’s new admirers had protested at the death sentence pronounced on him as a traitor in his absence in 1940 and none had answered his call to go to England and join him. Yvonne Bonnet, the friend of so many German soldiers, waved her flag in a frenzy, but Georgette Chevalier, the only person Juliette knew who’d taken any action to support the Resistance, was still held in a concentration camp. And the defeat of the German army in Normandy had been achieved by the Americans, Canadians and British, with only one division, the radio said, of Free French soldiers. Juliette didn’t know how many men that was, but not many.

  There was now official talk of America and Britain as ‘our friends, the Allies’; but for four years she’d walked to work past propaganda posters portraying these two countries as enemies – as Jews and Bolsheviks. It was not that she’d ever really believed that Mr Churchill was a moneylender, a Shylock in a London bowler hat, but the change of heart was too quick to be convincing. Meanwhile, on the streets many people joined the manhunt for fear they might otherwise themselves become the quarry; some of the most ardent avengers were those with the most to conceal.

  Juliette spoke of how the courts heard the cases of those who had collaborated with the now-defeated Occupier. But, she said, everyone had collaborated. ‘Collaboration’, after all, had been the official national policy, announced by Marshal Pétain, who had used the word proudly to describe the nature of the partnership he’d agreed with the Führer. How could it now be treason?

  There were to be no trials in the old courts because they had all worked under Vichy and were by definition therefore tainted. But it would take too long to wait for ‘clean’ courts to be set up by the new government, so some of the first hearings were with soldiers sitting as judges. These military sessions at first had powers only to detain people to await trial by a proper civil court in due course; but those in charge were frightened of the anger of the mob that might be provoked by any delay. So, with some misgivings, they also gave the military tribunals the powers of judgement and sentencing.

  To tell the truth, I found out most of this much later on. At the time it was chaos. Newspapers were limited to a single page and no one really knew what was going on, just that there was this sense of urgency. What I remember most about August and September was not the joy of liberation but the rush – the tearing hurry to avoid a civil war. It was more important to maintain order than to have justice. The people first in line were politicians like Pétain and Laval, then regional prefects who’d been too close to the Germans, then journalists and writers who’d been open in their support. Then of course there was the Milice. At Annecy they arrested a hundred members of the Milice who’d been active in rounding up Jews on behalf of the French government, in torturing and killing people suspected of being in the Resistance. The trial lasted only a day, and seventy-five Milice men were shot by a firing squad the next morning. But I had cousins in the south-west, where the Milice had done exactly the same things. When de Gaulle’s men arrived in their town, the Milice men also presumed they’d be put on trial and sentenced to death. But all that happened is that they were given new uniforms. They were told they were now to form a military reserve for the new Republic. The same men. This happened throughout the country. Later they became the basis of the riot police, the CRS.

  The new government was trying to run ahead of the mob. The situation was desperate and General de Gaulle understood that. But it meant there was no real justice. Firing squad or a new uniform, you didn’t know which to expect.

  One morning in September, perhaps three weeks after the Liberation, I was walking to the Métro to go to work when I was stopped in the street by three men. They each had different armbands. One had a hammer and sickle, one a big ‘V’ and one a cross of Lorraine. They asked me my name and said I was under arrest. I said under whose authority and they said the FFI. Since the FFI, the French Forces of the Interior, were the people officially in charge of the transition, I went with them to the police station, where I was put in a back room with eight other women. I think we all knew what was coming.

  Later that day, my name was called and I was taken in a van to a large building near Porte de la Chapelle. I don’t know what it was usually, but there was a room with three men in military uniform. Two men stood up and read out statements. I was too frightened to take in all of what they said. One statement was from the manager of Maxim’s restaurant, who had himself been arrested. Another was from a female neighbour or ‘friend’. I was asked if I’d slept with a German soldier and I said, No. I said I’d twice had dinner with an officer, but that was all. There had been no law against it so far as I knew. German soldiers and Parisian women mixed freely in public. I said that in my work I often came into contact with soldiers at the shop.

  It was over quickly. They had more important people to deal with and I was told I was free to go: I was not a ‘horizontal collaborator’. The senior soldier in charge was quite polite, he wasn’t angry, like so many people at that time. But outside the building there was a crowd being held back by two police officers behind a barrier and they were spitting and shouting. They were too many for the police to control. They broke through and I was grabbed and dragged down to the street to a barber shop. They put me in a chair and held my arms and legs while the barber shaved my head. Then they pushed me out onto the street again where I ran for my life. In the crowd of people shouting I saw the face of Yvonne Bonnet.

  Somehow – for all the pushing and spitting – I still had my handbag with me, still wearing it like a bandit. And when I’d run as far as I could, I stopped by a draper’s shop near Château d’Eau and bought a metre and a half of blue cloth, which I wound round my head like a turban. I was too ashamed to go home at once, so I hid among some trees in a park and waited till it was dark before I went back to my parents.

  Many other women had a far worse time of it. They were sent to the Vélodrome d’Hiver or to Drancy to wait for the proper courts to be set up. At Drancy, they were beaten by the same guards who had beaten the Jews.

  About a year later, after the concentration camps had been liberated, I saw Georgette Chevalier. By now she knew of all the medals that had been handed out to people who’d joined the Resistance only a few weeks before the Liberation. She wasn’t bitter, though. And she refused to give the name of the person who’d informed on her. I told her what had happened to me and she said, ‘To think when we sat next to each other at school. That it would come to this.’ Then she put her arms round me just as she had when we’d huddled by the campfire in the Vosges mountains, and I began to sob. I was ashamed that I’d not been more like her.

  She said, ‘It’s all right. We know what we did. I can sleep at night. So can you. But this will never, ever go away. Not until every last person who lived through it is dead.’

  And she was right. I still don’t know when that will be. Even a child who was ten in 1944 will have some memory. So maybe when even the last of them has gone – in the year 2034, perhaps.

  And as for me, I suppose I’m an old woman now, even if I don’t feel old. I have no shame. I feel only sorrow that my one life turned out like this. My youth came at the wrong time. I moved out of Paris in the end. I married a decent man, we had two children and we lived in a village in the Loire, where I taught at the infant school. In all the years I lived there, in all the parents’ meetings and evenings with friends of our age, no one asked what I’d done in Paris during the Occupation. It was a closed subject. We lived a sort of half-life all those years, the Sixties and Seventies and so on, quite comfortable in its way in our new house with enough to eat and summer holidays, and with friends nearby. But so much was never said.

  So I’m glad to have put down these memories at last and I hope that young people who listen to them will understand a little of what happened. What will they do with the k
nowledge? Can understanding the past help you to live better? That’s not for me to say, but I feel pleased to have come to the Centre Jean Molland these last few days and I am grateful to the people here for having invited me.

  By the way, my hair never grew back to what it had been before. It went grey when I was still young and I always had it cut before it reached my shoulders. I was never again that girl tripping down the steps from the raised platform of the Métro with my coat flying open and the whole world in front of me.

  For three days after listening to this, I shut myself in my bedroom in the flat in Butte-aux-Cailles. I left a note for Tariq asking him not to disturb me. I heard his footsteps come and go, his coughing in the morning from the coarse weed he smoked. But he’d become a more considerate lodger, closing the door quietly, no longer lighting cigarettes in the living room. I liked his euro offerings by the fruit bowl, too; they made me feel kindly towards him.

  In my room, I went over the downloaded Juliette file as well as my comments on the last recording at the Jean Molland and my interview at Mathilde’s apartment. Then I looked over the notes I’d made on further oral witnesses and on documents from other libraries I’d visited.

  With my rereading of the standard books, I was ready to start writing. I’d include some new statistics I’d discovered from documents at a Jewish library in the rue de Turenne as well as extensive quotation from the eyewitnesses. I’d gotten hold of some new data on pregnancy rates during the Occupation and some figures on women’s pay; taken all together, it was enough to be a contribution.

  The problem I wrestled with in my room was that the academic form seemed a bad fit for the task; there was so much I’d have to leave out. The testament of Mathilde and Juliette had been difficult to bear, to take on board, but it was harder still to think that my chapter might not do justice to their experiences.