by Chloe Garner
“A smile is sometimes better than a gun in war, Aurélie,” Bernard had said when he met her. “They can’t outlaw smiles.”
She’d stolen food, she’d transported false papers, she’d passed messages. It was exhilarating, and ultimately it was worth the frowns she got from her mother when she got home at night.
“And how was your day?” her mother would ask meaningfully as she transferred spoonfuls of sauced vegetables onto Aurélie’s plate.
“You did it when you were my age,” Aurélie scolded. Magdeleine’s face always soured further when Aurélie brought up her mother’s flamboyant past in the Resistance. That’s how she had met Aurélie’s father.
It was also how she had lost him, weeks after their quiet wedding and long before Aurélie was born. Aurélie was pretty sure that was also how Magdeleine had lost her sense of humor. Pierre talked, sometimes, of the crazy things they had done as teenagers under the first German occupation. Aurélie wished she’d gotten to meet that version of her mother.
Taking a quick look around, Aurélie got up from under the bridge and walked a few steps back, putting her fingers under her chin. It looked right. It would damage the bridge enough that the engine would derail, but it would just take time to fix. It wouldn’t fall down. She was almost sure of that.
She took the metal lighter out of her pocket and went back to the bomb, uncoiling the long fuse and leaving it along the ground in the weeds then, with a final look around, lit it, dropping it on the ground and getting back on the bike. She started the ride back to Bernard’s farm, humming to herself as she rode. She was not yet out of sight of the bridge when the bomb went off. She cursed and stood up on the pedals. She was supposed to be two miles away by the time it went off.
She rode for another minute, then heard a car engine behind her and sat back down on her bike, feigning innocence. The car pulled alongside her and a German soldier leaned out the window, addressing her in German. She smiled broadly and raised her eyebrows, shaking her head, and he tried again.
“You heard the bomb, yes?”
“Bomb?” she asked. “Is that what that was?”
“Yes. A bomb. Why did you not stop?”
She shook her head.
“I’m going home. I wasn’t listening. I didn’t really notice.”
“Who are you?” he asked. She swallowed, pasting the smile across her face.
“I’m Aurélie. I live that way.”
She took the papers out of her satchel that identified her as an orphan living with Bernard. They gave her an excuse for being this far out in the country.
“And what are you doing here, Aurélie?”
“I like to ride my bike.”
The papers disappeared into the car and a moment later, a door opened.
“We need you to come with us.”
They’d left her bike on the side of the road and taken her back to the farm.
She turned her face and wept when they shot Bernard in the head. They hadn’t asked her any questions, at that point. They just left Bernard lying in the courtyard of his family farm and drove her back into the city, where they put her in a small cement room and left her for most of a day.
She sat in a cold metal chair at a steel table and waited.
Finally a soldier entered and sat across from her.
“These papers, they are fake.”
She blinked at him.
“They are good, but they are fake.”
Again, she didn’t answer. He wasn’t expecting one. There hadn’t been a question yet.
“Who are you?”
“Aurélie Bertram.” The name on her papers.
“Where are your parents?”
“Dead.”
“Who are you?”
“Aurélie Bertram.”
“Why were you by the Marne?”
She winced to hear the river’s name butchered by his rough German accent.
“It’s a pretty river.”
“You weren’t there to sabotage the bridge?”
“No, sir.”
“Who are you?”
“Aurélie Bertram.”
“Who helped you build the bomb?”
She was silent.
“A little girl like you can’t know how to do that by herself. Was it the old man?”
“It’s a pretty river.”
He slammed the table.
“Who told you where to put the bomb?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, real tears springing to her eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”
It went on for a several hours like that, then he left and a woman soldier came to walk her to a tiny cell where three other women lay silent in dirty cots. Aurélie sat on a fourth cot and hugged her knees. She had been supposed to be two miles away by the time the bomb went off.
She was supposed to get away.
For weeks, it went like that. One woman or another would be taken at turns away to be questioned. They got very little food, and while the other women had family to visit them and bring them personal things, Aurélie had only a false name. Magdeleine wouldn’t even know if she were alive or dead.
They asked her many of the same questions over and over again. Who was Bernard? Who had he known? Who were his friends? Who had given her her instructions? She knew very little, but she said less. They had killed Bernard without warning and without ever being sure he was even involved. They would kill anyone else she loved just as easily.
Her skin grew scaly and her hair began to thin, as did her clothes. She washed them in the sink with her hands while the other women kept a listless watch for guards, the only bit of privacy they had. She thought often of her mother and of the unspoken things that had broken her as a young woman.
She wondered if she would be broken.
More weeks passed. Aurélie’s health continued to decline, and she suspected that she was no longer pretty. One of the women developed a cough that got progressively worse, until one day she didn’t get out of bed. The guards came and took her away and days later, there was a new woman who took her place, her clothes new and her skin clean, her face scared.
Aurélie wondered if she had looked like that.
They heard planes go overhead from time to time, and Aurélie silently cheered, hoping that they were our planes, and not theirs. She had once had an internal compass like a homing bird, but inside the prison she lost all sense of direction, and she couldn’t tell which way the planes were going or coming from. She supposed it didn’t matter. The lucky ones all made both trips.
Bombs fell. The building shook and she hoped one would hit the prison. Then she would escape or die. Either way, it would finally be over.
Another of the women died, and she was replaced by an angry woman with black hair.
“Bastards,” the woman muttered as she shoved her body against the bars. She came to sit on the empty bed and looked around the room. She zeroed in on Aurélie.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Aurélie Bertram,” Aurélie said quietly. The woman spoke with too much volume. After so long in the quiet, it was intimidating.
“Right,” the woman said. “And what did you do?”
This was a dangerous question. One that was never asked. Aurélie felt her eyes widen.
“What did you do?”
The woman grinned.
“Punched a soldier for getting friendly.”
Aurélie was stunned. The woman acted French, and she sounded French, but she didn’t sound French.
“What did you do?” the woman asked again.
“They say I bombed a rail bridge,” Aurélie said carefully. The woman grinned again, dark and mirthless.
“Good for you. Bastards.”
The confidence was seductive. As was holding a conversation with someone who wouldn’t have preferred to speak German.
“What will happen?” she asked. The woman frowned.
“How long have you been here?”
“Too long,” Aurélie a
nswered, honestly. She had no idea.
“They’ve been emptying the prisons. Bastards. Running scared. Yankees are giving them hell.”
Aurélie did her best not to look stunned. She had never known a woman to talk like that. Even Bernard had only used those words around her when he was drunk.
“What will happen to us?”
“Germans intend to lose us,” the woman said. “They’ve been losing a lot of people, here lately.”
“How can you be so… carefree?” Aurélie asked.
“She’s drunk,” one of the other women muttered. The woman cast a dark look at the one who spoke, then shook her head.
“I don’t like bullies. Never have. Been a long time since I fought them, myself, though. Feels good.”
Aurélie stared, then shook her head. She took one long last look at the dark-haired woman, then lay down and rolled to face the wall. The spark of hope that had lit in her chest was almost too painful to bear, and she spent the rest of the evening doing her best to smother it.
It happened like the woman said. A couple of weeks later, the guards came and moved them all out of the cell and into a truck. The truck took them to the rail station where they were unloaded and loaded into a shipping car at the cargo platform. The dark woman had quieted considerably since her first day, but Aurélie continued to find herself magnetized to her as a source of strength. Clearly they hadn’t broken her, and it gave Aurélie hope, even if hope often felt like a form of poison to her.
They sat near the back of the container, packed in like livestock, and watched through the slits as the French countryside rolled away from them.
“Where are they taking us?” someone whispered.
“Germany,” another answered. Aurélie looked to the spirited woman for opinion and she nodded.
“Why aren’t you afraid?” Aurélie asked.
“Bad as it is, I’ve seen the end of this story too many times to be afraid of it,” the woman answered. Aurélie blinked, then turned her face into the woman’s heavy sleeve, not wanting to see.
They stopped a few times to take on fuel and water in little towns where soldiers stood on the platforms and pointedly ignored the women packed into the shipping car.
They stopped once more, and Aurélie ignored it, not wanting to feel like the caged animal she was as she stared out at the soldiers, but whispers drew her attention. She turned her face to the crack she had pressed her back against in an effort to keep out the winter cold and found that they were in open space. The whispers grew louder and more excited.
Somewhere ahead of them, there was shouting in German. Aurélie understood the words, but couldn’t make enough sense of the confusion to figure out what was happening.
“Stay close,” the woman with the black hair said. Aurélie nodded agreement, not wanting to ask why, but taking the comfort she was offered.
“Leave them,” someone yelled.
“They aren’t yours,” someone else yelled. The French women grew agitated as the translations whispered through them. Aurélie felt the black-haired woman brace herself.
“I’m not leaving,” the first voice yelled.
“You have no authority.”
“You have my wife.”
“You may not free them.”
“I’m not leaving.”
There was more conversation, quick, excited, and indiscernible, and then the door on the side of the car slid open. The women pressed back from the light as a German soldier entered. The dark-haired woman fell onto Aurélie as the soldier leveled his gun. Buried under the woman’s solid body, the gunshots were muffled, but still enough to make Aurélie jump. She bit her lips to keep from screaming.
“Stay still,” the woman grunted. “Just stay perfectly still.”
The gunfire continued for several more seconds, and then there was more shouting outside. Frantic, angry. Aurélie was frozen, pressed against the cold, splintery floor of the car with fluid rolling down her face. She slowly came to the realization that the dark haired woman was dead. Her mass was a dead weight on Aurélie’s body, and no breath moved her. Terrified, she listened to the muffled German outside, still, still, ever so still.
The conversation ended and with sick dread, Aurélie waited for the train to start again.
It didn’t.
Timidly, she pulled herself out from under the dead woman, wiping blood from her face, and, moving as slowly as she could, she put her eye to the slats.
The soldiers were dead on the ground outside.
A shadow crossed the sunlight pouring in from outside and Aurélie froze. A tall man with dark hair was picking through the bodies. He wore a German uniform.
She couldn’t run. There was nowhere to go. She lay back on the floor of the car, bidding herself to not so much as breathe, and squeezed her eyes shut against tears.
He got closer.
She held her breath.
And then he stopped.
Certain as she was that she was going to die, she had to look.
He was bent over the woman’s body, only inches away from Aurélie, holding her against his chest. He touched her sleek black hair with his palm, then kissed her mouth for a long time. When he stood, he looked directly at Aurélie.
“Stay with her,” he said. “She will take care of you.”
He stood and left without looking back. Bewildered, lost, and grief-stricken, Aurélie pulled her knees against her chest and cried silently until dusk.
She didn’t know what to do. The train was in the middle of nowhere, for all she knew, and she didn’t know who to go to or how to hide. She was completely alone in threadbare clothes and covered in blood.
But she had to do something.
She steadied herself, brushing tears from her cheeks, and stood, trying to find how she would make her way out of the container without stepping on anyone. She couldn’t bear to step on anyone.
And then the woman at her feet grunted.
Aurélie froze, back pressed against the wall, as the woman slowly pushed herself to her knees and then her feet.
“You’d think it would get easier,” she said. Aurélie was speechless. The woman squinted at her in the dim light. “Well, come on.”
“I don’t know where we are,” Aurélie said. The woman grunted again, rolling her shoulders.
“I do.”
They walked across a well-kept estate, down rows of grapes.
“Who are you?” Aurélie finally asked.
“Isobel,” the woman answered. Aurélie waited, but that seemed to be all the woman was going to say.
“Why did you save me?”
“I made a promise to your mother,” Isobel said, “and I keep my promises.”
“You were dead.”
“I don’t have an explanation for you.”
They walked for another minute.
“You know my mother?”
“I did. I kept her alive though the great war. The first one, anyway.”
“Did you know my father?”
“I did.”
“How did you find me?”
Isobel laughed her dark laugh.
“That took some work.”
“But you got arrested… You couldn’t have known.”
“I said it took some work.”
The grapes transitioned into a wide courtyard where stooped old men sat in wicker chairs. Aurélie’s instinct was to hide, but Isobel kept walking. One of the men touched his hat as she went by, walking straight toward the great house.
“I thought the Germans claimed all of these,” Aurélie said.
“They did,” Isobel answered, pushing open the front door. Aurélie followed her timidly into the foyer.
“Go up those stairs and into the first room on the left. There are clothes on the bed that you can change into after you bathe.”
Aurélie followed the instructions numbly, stopping halfway up the stairs.
“You saw my mother?”
“I did.”
“Is
she okay?”
“She’s worried about you.”
Aurélie nodded, then continued up stair after stair after stair until her feet finally found the landing and then the door and then the bath.
The clean clothes were almost enough to make her cry again. They covered over the sores on her skin and gave her gaunt figure in the mirror an appearance she at least recognized. She heard a door open and close downstairs and she went to stand in the hallway, listening.
“Was that really the best you could do?” Isobel asked in English.
“If you’d made it to Germany, I never would have found you,” a man answered.
“I asked you to get us out, not get all of those women killed.”
“You know most of them would have died, anyway.”
“You’re fighting with worse animals than usual,” Isobel said.
“You’ve known who I am. Don’t act surprised.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of being on the wrong side?”
“Don’t you ever get tired of being on the wrong side of history?”
“I was right last time.”
“I don’t think it will happen twice.”
“They’re retreating.”
“I know.”
“They’re evil.”
“I know.”
There was a long silence, and Aurélie started down the stairs.
“Did you really punch him in the face?” the man asked.
“Can’t tell you how good it felt.”
Aurélie turned the corner to see Isobel sitting at a vast dining room table with the German officer from the train.
“Who are you?”
Isobel looked down at the teacup in her fingers, then set it down on its matched saucer, drawing a breath and sighing.
“Come sit, child,” she said. The German looked at her with an odd expression.
“Why this one?” he asked.
“Because of you,” Isobel said with some of the fire she’d shown with the soldiers back at the prison. “Because of the mark you just put on her life.”