by War
The old Jew in the bed looked more dead than alive; gray-bearded, big-nosed, with large melancholy brown eyes feverishly bright in a waxy sunken face.
"Your uncle seems to be very sick indeed," said the comtesse in the director's office, where she invited Natalie for a cup of "verbena tea" which tasted like, and perhaps was, boiled grass.
"He almost died of internal hemorrhaging," said Natalie.
"My husband says he can't return to Baden-Baden for a while. When he's well enough he'll be moved to our convalescent home. Now then, Mrs. Henry, the general tells me that you're Radcliffe, with a Sorbonne graduate degree.
Pas mal. How would you like to do something useful?"
She walked with Natalie to her boardinghouse; declared the place unfit for an American to be caught dead in; cooed, or rather croaked, over Louis; and undertook to move them to decent lodgings. Marching Natalie to an old mansion near the hospital, converted to flats occupied by hospital staff, she then and there arranged room and board for her and the baby. By nightfall she had moved them to the new place, executed the necessary papers at the prefecture, and checked them in with the German administrator of the Neuilly suburb.
When she left, she promised to return in the morning and take Natalie to the library by Metro. She would arrange, she said, for someone to look after Louis.
Natalie was quite overborne by this crabbed old fairy godmother materializing out of nowhere. Her transportation into Germany had put her into a state of mild persisting shock. In the Baden-Baden hotel with its unfriendly German staff, incessant German talk, German menus and signs, Gestapo men in the lobby and the corridors, and glum American internees, her nervous system had half-shut down, narrowing her awareness to herself and Louis, to their day-to-day needs, and to possible dangers. The opportunity to go to Paris had seemed like a pardon from jail, once the Swiss representative had assured her that several special-case Americans dwelled freely in German-occupied Paris, and that she would be under Swiss protective surveillance there, just as in Baden-Baden. But before the comtesse burst upon her, she had seen little of Paris. She had cowered in her room, playing with Louis or reading old novels. Mornings and evenings she had scurried to the hospital to visit her uncle and scurried back again, fearing police challenge and having no confidence in her papers.
A new time began with her employment at the library. She had work, the best of anodynes. She was moving about. The first scary check of her papers in the Metro went off without trouble. After all, Paris was almost as familiar to her as New York, and not much changed.
The crushing crowds in the Metro, including many young German soldiers, were a disagreeable novelty, but there was no other way to get around Paris now except for bicycles, decrepit old horse carriages, and queer'bicycle-taxis like rickshaws. The library task was simple, and the comtesse was enchanted with her speed and ready grasp.
Natalie had mixed feelings about the strange old woman.
Her literary talk was bright, her run of anecdotes about famous people tartly amusing; and she was an impressive Shakespeare scholar.
Her - political and social opinions, however, were hard to take.
France had lost the war, she averred, for three reasons; Herbert Hoover's moratorium on German war reparations, the weakening of France by the socialist Front Populaire, and the treachery of the British in running away at Dunkirk. France had been misled by the English and her own stupid politicians into attacking Germany (Natalie wondered whether to believe her ears at that remark). Still, if the French army had only listened to her husband and massed its tank forces in armored divisions, instead of scattering them piecemeal among the infantry, an armored counterstroke in Belgium could have cut off the panzer columns in their dash to the sea, and won the war then and there.
She never troubled to coordinate or justify her opinions and judgments; she just let them off like firecrackers. Pierre Laval was the misunderstood savior of France. Charles de Gaulle was a posturing charlatan, and his statement, "France has lost a battle, not a war," was irresponsible rubbish. The Resistance was a riffraff of communists and bohemians, preying on their fellow Frenchmen and bringing reprisals on them without hurting the Germans.
As to the occupation, despite its austerities, there was something to be said for it.
The theatre was much more wholesome now, offering classics and clean comedies, not the sexy farces and depraved boulevardier dramas of other days; and the concerts were more enjoyable without all the horrid modern dissonance which nobody really understood.
Anything Natalie said touched off a monologue. Once as they worked together on cartons of books left by an American movie producer, Natalie remarked that life in Paris seemed curiously close to normal.
"My dear child, normal? It's ghastly. Of course the Boche wants to make Paris seem normal, even charming. Paris is the showpiece, don't you see, of the 'New Order."
" She uttered the phrase with acid sarcasm. "That's why the theatres, the opera, and the concerts are encouraged and even subsidized.
That's why our poor little library is staying open. Dear me, the poor Boches do try so hard to act civilized, but they're such animals, really. Of course, they're a lot better than the Bolsheviks.
Actually, if Hitler had just had the common sense not to invade France, just to finish off the Soviet Union, which he obviously could have done in 1940, he'd be a world hero today and there'd be peace.
Now we must wait for America to rescue us."
Natalie saw her first yellow star while walking to lunch with the comtesse along a busy boulevard. Two women in smart tailored suits passed them, one talking vivaciously, the other laughing. On both women's suits, over the left breast, the star glared. The comtesse took no notice whatever. As time passed Natalie saw a few more; not many, just an occasional yellow star worn in the same matter-of-fact way. Rabinovitz had told her of a tremendous public roundup of Jews in Paris a year ago; either most of them had been swept away by that, or they were staying out of sight. The placards barring Jews from restaurants and public telephone booths were curling and dusty. Every day, the casually ferocious anti-Semitism in familiar papers like Paris-Soir and Le Matin startled her, for the front pages looked no different than in peacetime, and some of the columnists were the same.
Occupied Paris did have its peculiarly charming aspect: quiet clean streets free of honking taxicabs and jammed-up automobiles, clear fumeless air, brightly dressed children playing in uncrowded flowery parks, horse carriages bearing women in striking Parisian finery, all as in old paintings of the city. But the leprous trace of occupation was everywhere: large black-lettered signs like CONCORDE-PLATZ and SOLDATEN KINO; yellow wall posters with long lists of executed saboteurs; crimson swastika flags fluttering on official buildings and monuments, on the Arc de Triomphe, on the Eiffel Tower; chalked menus in German outside restaurants, German army machines driving down the wide empty boulevards, and off-duty Wehrmacht soldiers in their green-gray uniforms sloppily strolling the sidewalks with cameras.
Once Natalie came on a FIFE and drum corps leading a goose-stepping guard up the Champs-Elysdes toward the Arc de Triomphe with rat-tat-tat and shrill martial music, swastika banners streaming; the occupation was summed up in that one , strange glimpse.
The adaptability of the human spirit is its saving. So long as Natalie was buried in work at the library, or spending the evening with Louis, or strolling after lunch along the Seine looking at the bookstalls, she was all right. Once a week she checked in at the Swiss legation. On a day when Louis was ill and she stayed home, a tall well-dressed young Swiss diplomat came calling, to make certain all was well. That was reassuring. Paris seemed Icss frightening than Marseilles; the people looked less hunted and better fed, and the police acted more civilized.
After three weeks Aaron was moved to the convalescent home and given a room overlooking the garden. Weak and lethargic still, hardly able to talk, he appeared to take the luxurious treatment quite for granted.
But it p
uzzled Natalie.
She had accepted the move to Paris as innocuous, since the doctor in Baden-Baden had explained that the American Hospital had an excellent staff, and that her uncle would be better off there than in Frankfurt. Paris itself was incomparably pleasanter than Baden-Baden.
Nevertheless, a shadowy dread never quite left her, a dread like that of a child's about the mystery of a locked room, a dread of the unknown; an uneasy sense that the gracious treatment of her uncle and her own freedom in a German-occupied city were not bits of good luck, but a riddle. When the answer came at last at the American Library it was less a surprise than the flight of opening the dark locked room.
The comtesse called from the outer office, "Natalie! We have a visitor. An old friend of yours."
She was squatting amid piles of books in a back room, writing up lists. Pushing the hair away from her face, she hurried out to the office. There Werner Beck stood, bowing, clicking his heels, wrinkling his eyes shut in an amiable smile.
"The minister of the German embassy," said the comtesse.
"Why didn't you tell me you knew Werner?"
She had not dressed in formal clothes since leaving Siena; where, despite the casual Italian house arrest, she had sometimes put on a faded long dress for an evening out. By now living out of suitcases, alternating the same few travelling clothes, had become her way of life. In Natalie's shocked and frightened frame of mind that evening, putting on the Cinderella finery which the comtesse had obtained for her seemed a grotesque mockery, a morbid last farewell to her femininity before getting hanged. The stuff fitted; the comtesse's cousin was just her size. Drawing smooth pearly silk stockings on her legs and up her thighs to the garters gave Natalie a very queer feeling. Where did even a rich Parisienne get such stockings nowadays?
What would it be like to dress like this for an evening out with Byron in peacetime, instead of for this chilling nightmare?
She did her best to paint herself to match the high-fashion gray crepe silk dress, but she had only rudimentary cosmetics, dry and cracking with disuse: a rouge pot, a lipstick, the stub of an eyebrow pencil, and a little mascara. Louis watched her making up with wide wondering eyes, as though she were setting fire to herself. She was still at this task when the gray-headed baby-sitter looked in.
"Madame, your gentleman is here in his car downstairs-oh, madame, but you are ravishing!"
There had been no alternative to accepting Beck's staggering invitation; and had there been, she would have been too frightened to try. To the comtesse's wry comment when he left the library-"Well!
The German minister, and The Marriage of Figaro! Pas nwi"-Natabe had blurted, "But how can he possibly do this? Aside from my being an enemy alien, he knows I'm Jewish."
With a curving grin of her thin wrinkled old mouth -they had never referred to this topic before-the comtesse replied, "My dear, the Germans please themselves, ils sont les vainqueurs. The thing is, what will you wear?"
Not a question about Natalie's relation with Beck, not a catty remark; just a brisk getting down to the business of equipping a fellow female for a fashionable night out in Paris.
The comtesse's cousin, a dark bucktoothed young woman, was quite buffaloed by the comtesse's sudden appearance at her flat with the American girl. Without many words, if also without visible joy, she meekly produced the finery demanded of her. The comtesse passed judgment on every item, even insisting on a bottle of good scent.
Whether the comtesse was doing this out of kindness, or to curry favor with the German minister, Natalie had no way of discerning. She just did it, quickmarch.
Louis stared in a hurt way when his mother left without kissing him. Her lips felt thick and greasy, and she was afraid to smear him up, and herself, too. Down the stairs she went in a wine-colored velvet cowled cloak, feeling after all the womanly excitement of dressing up. She did look beautiful, he was a man, and she was under Swiss protection. This was the scariest thing that had happened to her yet in -these endless months of trouble, but she had survived much, and she felt ready for a desperate defense.
The Mercedes stood there in the blue streetlight and the light of a full moon. Murmuring compliments, he stepped out and opened the door for her. The night was warm, and smelled of flowering trees in the railed front garden of the old house.
Natalie said as he started the car, "This may be a tactless question, but how can you be seen with a Jewess?"
His serious face, dimly lit by the glow of the dashboard dials, relaxed in a smile. "The ambassador knows that you and your uncle are in Paris. The Gestapo of course knows, too. They also know I am taking you to the opera tonight.
Who you are is nobody else's business. Are you uneasy?"
"Horribly."
"What can I do to reassure you? Or would you rather not go? The last thing I want to do is force a disagreeable evening on you. I thought you might enjoy this. I intended it as a friendly, or at least reconciling, gesture."
Natalie had to find out what this man was up to, if she possibly could. "Well, I'm dressed up now. It's very kind of YOU."
"You do like Mozart?"
"Of course. I haven't hear The Marriage of Figaro in years."
"I'm happy I've hit on a pleasant amusement."
"How long have you known that we were in Paris?"
"Mrs. Henry, I knew that you were in Lourdes." He was driving slowly down the empty black streets. "Winston Churchill, you know, paid General Rommel a handsome compliment during the Africa campaign.
"Across the gulf of war," he said, "I salute a great general."
Your uncle is a brilliant scholar,. Henry, but he isn't a strong or practical man. Getting from Siena to Marseilles surely was your doing.
Your escape caused me terrific embarrassment.
However, "across the gulf of war' I salute you. You have courage."
Left hand on the wheel, Beck offered Natalie his pudgy right hand.
Natalie could do nothing but shake it. It felt damp and cold.
"How did you find out we were in Lourdes?" Involuntarily she wiped her hand on the cloak, then hoped he'didn't notice.
"Through the effort to get you released. The French brought it to our attention at once, naturally, and-"
"What? What effort? We didn't know about any such effort."
"You're sure?" His head turned in surprise.
"It's complete news to me."
"That is interesting." He nodded"several times. "Well, there was an approach from Washington to let you cross quietly into Spain.
My reaction when you turned up was one of relief. I feared you had come to harm."
Natalie was stunned. Who had tried'to get them released?
What bearing did it have on their predicament now? "So that betrayed our presence to you?"
"Oh, I was bound to find-out. At the embassy we've kept close watch on your group right along. Quite a mixture, eh?
Diplomats, journalists, Quakers, wives, babies, whatnot! By the way, the doctor at the Victoria Home informed me today that your uncle is much on the mend."
Natalie said nothing, and after a while Beck spoke again.
"Don't you find the Co tesse de Chamb n an interesting woman?
Very cultured?" character, certainly."
"Yes, that's an;apt word for her."
That ended the chitchat. Walking out of the blackout into the blaze of the opera foyer dazzled Natalie. A time machine, as it were, hurtled her back to the Paris of 1937. Nothing was different from her opera-going evenings with Leslie Slote, except the scattering of German uniforms. Here was the essence of the Paris she remembered, this grandiose lobby with its marble columns, magnificent staircase, and rich statuary; the hairy students in raincoats with their shortskirted girl friends, owding amid working people toward the entrances to the cheap seats; the middle-class comfortable looking couples heading for the orchestra; and the thin glittery stream of the beau monde threading through the crowd.
The noise was animated and very French,
the faces -perhaps a shade more pinched and pallid than in the old days -were mostly French, and the smart few were pure French top to toe; especially the women, the eternal elegant Parisiennes, beautifully coiffed and made up displaying in every flash of eye, Turn of bare arm, quick laughter, the arts of shining and pleasing. Some were with Frenchmen in dinner jackets, some with German officers. In the commoner crowd German soldiers also escorted French girls, prettily gotten up and glowing with kittenish vivacity.
Perhaps because Natalie was in an aroused state, with the adrenalin pumping at the alarming proximity of Dr. Beck, this plunge into the opera lobby dazzled her not only with light, but with a searing mental flash. Who then, she thought, were the "collaborationists," derided and excoriated by the Allied press and the de Gaulle broadcasts? Here they were.
Wasn't it so? They were the French. They were the people.