In light of what happened later, I wonder if I would have liked the baroness more if we’d met under different circumstances. Without the competition over Gabor. Without her power and money. Meanwhile I became obsessed with the way she stubbed out her cigarette in her picked-over food. I waited for it, all through the meal. She put it out and left it there for someone else to clear away.
Whenever the subject of children came up, she would tilt her head and turn to one of the men and say, in a little-girl voice, “I don’t have any children.” As if he didn’t know! Was he supposed to feel sorry for her and to find her pathos sexy? Or was she informing him that motherhood hadn’t wrecked her boyish body? I didn’t have children either, but I didn’t feel the need to say so.
Periodically, she would emerge from her fog of worry and distraction and organize excursions in the two Rossignols she kept in the garage. She also had the magic power to make gasoline appear. I often felt that her fear about Didi and her anxiety about France were competing with her terror that she, or one of her guests, would get bored.
Life at the château was . . . bearable, I would say. Years later, I read about how Samuel Beckett worked with the underground in Paris and had to hide out in the south. Near us, though we didn’t know it. He went insane from boredom until he found the local Resistance and carried out secret missions. Boy Scout stuff, he called it.
There was no anti-Nazi cell near the baroness’s château, or none that trusted us. We were always outsiders. City people, waiting.
I longed for the smells of Paris, for the damp cold, the mildew, the rats. It is not a vacation when you can’t go home. The only slightly happy guests were the landscape painters. I missed my mother terribly. When the phones worked, I could call the café next door. Her friends and neighbors took care of her, and she was as well as could be expected, given the shortages of food and fuel and everything she needed. The baroness offered to ask one of Didi’s employees to check on her, but she never remembered to tell him, and I couldn’t bring myself to remind her. I was afraid of how much I would hate her if she forgot again.
I missed watching strangers on the street. I missed seeing, in a pâtisserie, expensive cakes baked with imitation ingredients. I missed the displays of shoes made from cardboard and chewing gum, baby clothes stitched from old napkins: whatever could be scrounged. I missed never knowing who I might run into. I missed passing a window and hearing a child practice piano scales. I missed organ grinders, carousels. I missed human beings! My homesickness deepened each time someone said that the Paris I missed was gone: it was only a memory now. The cafés were empty, the newspaper kiosks boarded up. Everyone interesting had left. The only people one met now were spies, soldiers, or German civilians.
And Gabor? He missed Lionel, who had gone back to the States. Everything reminded Gabor of the loss of his friend. When I showed him the lizards in the garden, he told me that Lionel used to speculate about whether Yvonne had sex with her pets. I too was surprised by the size of the empty space that Lionel’s absence created.
Gabor stopped writing his parents, who must have been frantic. He was afraid that his letters would be read. He said that the postal system was an easy way for the Germans to keep track of our whereabouts. Why attract attention until we knew what they had in mind?
For once he was not being paranoid. New arrivals showed up at the château, en route from Paris to Lisbon, artists, musicians, longtime Rossignol customers, a steady stream of Jewish friends. That was how we learned what was happening to the French Jews. In the middle of nowhere, we heard what was going on, so those who say they didn’t know must have never gone outside or had one conversation with another person.
I know this is not a popular view. No French citizen wants to hear it. That is one of the reasons I have repeatedly changed my mind about whether I want my memoirs destroyed after I am dead.
One day a Jewish violinist arrived at the château. He’d been loaded onto a boxcar in Vienna and traveled, without food or water, alongside the dead and dying. When the doors were opened, he found himself in Toulouse.
Our problems seemed trivial compared to those of the Jews. No matter how our hearts ached for them, we were relieved when they left, not only because we hoped they would be safe but because of our guilt. Being unable to help them increased the strain on our nerves.
That Gabor was Hungarian was a constant worry, but as the baroness reminded him: he was a famous artist. When new arrivals told stories about violence and close calls, I knew that Gabor was thinking, My negatives! My prints! Should I have been angry at him for caring so much about pictures when so many people were suffering? It wasn’t as if we’d just met. I knew who he was, and I loved him.
Instead of gifts, the guests brought horror stories. The black jazz musicians had been rounded up and sent to camps. An official decree declared that jazz was a Jewish plot. Swastikas flapped from every monument, as the Nazis shoved our faces in the shit of defeat.
But eventually we began to hear that life was returning to normal. Or almost normal. Though obviously not for the Jews. I was sure, or almost sure, that the Germans weren’t crazy enough to destroy our beautiful city. Hitler had always wanted to visit Paris in triumph. If there was no Paris, there would be no triumphal visit.
The Germans didn’t want trouble. They wanted to smoke on the Métro, cut the lines at the theaters and opera, and look at naked girls. They adored the cafés and clubs, the Bal Tabarin, the Cigale, the Select. The overpriced tourist traps in Montmartre rose like phoenixes from the ashes.
The curfew was lifted, then clamped down again after a German official was stabbed. Did my German students say parsnip to mean the hours after which people could be shot for being on the street? A strict nine o’clock parsnip was imposed throughout the city.
Ultimately, the baroness was the one who suggested returning. At the time she had other guests, but she took Gabor and me aside.
She said, “Didi is there. Gabor’s photos are there. Everything we love is in Paris.”
Four of us traveled together in the Rossignol. Gabor and I rode behind the baroness and her Italian driver, Frank. I suspected that they were having an affair, but they were very discreet. One night, at an inn near Avignon, I thought I heard them in the room above ours. Gabor got annoyed when I asked him if he thought they were lovers. He was furious when I woke him to listen to them upstairs. I asked him if he was jealous. He said I knew him better than that. It made me happy to hear him say that I knew him better than to ask him what I’d asked.
There were roadblocks everywhere. The Germans examined our papers and calculated how much fun they could have. The luxuriousness of the baroness’s car and the presence of a chauffeur said fun maybe, fun certainly, but possibly repercussions. It was easier and safer to have fun with the poor.
Later, those of us who survived were often quoted by journalists and interviewed by documentarians. We wrote best-selling memoirs and consulted on feature films. And if we were away from home when the Germans invaded, we made sure to say so. We wanted it known that we weren’t trapped but chose to return and fight from within. One of the boldest heroines of the Resistance was in California on an academic fellowship with her husband and child. They came back to Paris from Berkeley. And the husband was Jewish! You can’t blame people for wanting credit, for wanting the world to know how bravely they faced the threat of torture, prison, and death.
Didn’t we do enough without also having to be humble? What does ego matter, even an ego like the baroness’s, which burbles up through every word of her memoir, A Baroness by Night, and which must be part of the reason why her book has done so well.
Was everyone’s motive pure? One didn’t ask why people did what they did. I wish I could take credit for courage, pure and simple. But the truth was less exalted. I wanted to stay with my boyfriend. Gabor’s life’s work was in Paris. And I needed to be with my mother. It still shames me that I left her. Even after she’d outlasted the war by a decade and died pea
cefully in her own bed, even now I am certain that if there is a day of judgment, all my good deeds will be weighed against my having abandoned Mama during those critical months.
It was November 1940, when we got back to Paris. The city was foggy and cold. Even the cobblestones seemed tender, melancholy and fragile.
Rattling over the streets shook Gabor from sleep. He mumbled, “Mama, Papa. We’re home.”
I’d seen him do that before. The baroness turned around. It was an awkward moment. I was the one who knew what he said, half conscious. I was the one who squeezed his hand, hard enough to wake him fully.
Gabor said, “Look at that!” But we were already looking. Paris was dressed, like a stolen child, in the kidnapper’s clothes. That our city had been humiliated only made us love her more.
I asked Frank to let me off a few blocks from my apartment. I ran the rest of the way with my cardboard suitcase banging against my shins. Mama rose to greet me and kissed my forehead as calmly as if I’d just returned from an afternoon at the language school.
How neatly the Germans sliced through our lives, separating past from present, so that the most tedious daily chores shimmered with nostalgia for a time when we hadn’t appreciated how sweet tedium could be. What foolish things we’d worried about: breakups, sugar, tobacco. We’d taken for granted the freedom to go through the day without someone reminding you that he can spit on you, or shoot you, or send you to the Gestapo headquarters, where, one heard, interrogations had begun.
At first I thought I could keep my head down and wait out the Occupation. By now all my students were German. I told myself I could stay sane by playing those little jokes, sending them out with the wrong words for what they stole, for what they could force us to do. The Allies would win. Gabor and I would go back to our lives, our love deepened by what we’d been through.
Then I took the Métro and sat next to the German soldier, smoking.
Before the Occupation, a Métro ride was simply a trip from point A to point B. All that mattered was how far you were going and how well you knew the route. I was constantly back and forth from Gabor’s studio to the language school to Mama’s apartment. I was always going far, I always knew the route.
Even during those anxious months, there was plenty to look at: a child with a pig nose made from a pincushion tied on with ribbons. A woman in a red hat with a comet of pheasant feathers. A man in a cashmere overcoat with a doctor’s bag and a black eye. A fur stole with a weasel’s head missing one eye. A girl applying lipstick while the train pitched and rocked.
I’d always loved watching the students acting out their little dramas. When the kids exploded into the car, it was a welcome distraction from the grown-ups’ faces on which, as the war approached, all one saw was worry. It felt wrong to be interested in how frightened people were.
But after the invasion, even the teenagers were afraid. They lost their natural boisterousness and became quiet and watchful. Worse things were happening. French boys were being deported. The Germans were murdering Jews, and French people were helping them do it. But when I saw the school kids, I thought, Their youth is being stolen, the only youth they will ever have. Instead of being focused on themselves, like normal adolescents, all they saw, all the rest of us saw, were the German soldiers smoking.
Surely it cannot be possible that during the entire Occupation I never once rode the Métro without seeing a German light up. But that is what I remember. I remember you couldn’t avoid it.
Smoking in the Métro became illegal during the Occupation. But even before, no French person did it, except for the rare lunatic or drunk, whom their fellow passengers gently but firmly reprimanded. It was an unusual clause in the social contract, because in those days we smoked as we sang our children to sleep, smoked on the street, at the beach, in the bath. It was unheard of to have sex without afterward smoking in bed. And this was when tobacco was so scarce you smoked each stub till it burned your fingers, and then you went through the ashtrays and rerolled the butts. When the tobacconist could no longer be charmed out of a few strands, we smoked dried nettles or artichoke leaves, though it was hard on the throat.
Everyone on the train watched the smoking Germans, and when new passengers boarded, that was all they saw. After that the entire ride was about how each person reacted, whether we ignored it or rolled our eyes, too subtly to cause trouble. The smoking soldiers made a point of sitting next to elderly people, children, and pregnant women.
There was no point switching compartments. Not unless you wanted to ride with another German smoking in another car. How could we not feel defeated? Perhaps it was a low-cost form of psychological warfare.
It helped us build the Resistance. We learned how to communicate down the length of a Métro car with hardly an observable glance and not a word spoken.
One afternoon, a German officer sat beside me and lit up a cigar. He puffed a thick cloud in my face. He took off his glasses and wiped them to observe my reaction more clearly. He wasn’t smiling, just looking. To see how I enjoyed it.
I liked the smell of cigars. Mama said that Papa used to smoke them in the toilet, which may explain why the smell of certain cigars can still make me burst into tears. But sitting beside the German, I thought, I am going to vomit. The door opened, and I rushed out, though it wasn’t my station. I headed for the stairs and fought my way toward light and air.
There was my friend Ricardo, waiting to cross the street! My stomach felt instantly better. We were thrilled to see each other for the first time since the invasion. I asked Ricardo if he was working. Thanks to some miracle or bureaucratic oversight, they were still letting him practice surgery at the American hospital. Most foreign doctors and South Americans had been interned or deported.
I said, “They’re letting you work because you’re so good at it.” He shrugged, then asked if I’d been in Paris the whole time. I said I’d been in the south with Gabor.
“Oh,” he said. “You’re still with him?”
I said, “Yes, we are very happy.”
The moment I asked about Paul, I knew. It was terrible to see Ricardo’s eyes glisten with tears. He said, “He’s been deported. We assume he’s somewhere in Germany.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “We?”
He took a closer look at me. A diagnostic look. I felt the anxiety one feels in the doctor’s office. He asked why I’d seemed so upset when I surfaced from the Métro. I said it was nothing. A trivial annoyance.
In Gabor’s portrait, Ricardo and Paul are costumed in silver paint and peacock feathers. The photo had always spooked Gabor. His mother had given him the crazy idea that peacock feathers were bad luck. His mother had been right.
I told Ricardo about the German soldier, smoking on the Métro. I said I’d had it up to here. I raised my hand above my head. He looked to see how high.
He said, “We think Paul is in a labor camp, but we can’t find out where. The Red Cross is useless.”
I couldn’t stand to think of Paul being afraid or in pain. I hugged Ricardo for a long time. People walked around us. Ricardo looked at me again, and we had one of those moments of silent, 100 percent understanding.
He invited me to a party. A gathering of some friends. I knew what he meant: a party. I knew what he meant: some friends. I’d always had a gift for languages. Now I was learning a new one.
I should thank the cigar-smoking German, whoever he was. Perhaps he died in the war, or in prison, or years later in a hospital bed, from smoking-related causes. I’d like to tell him: you did me a favor. You and your filthy stinking cigar pushed me over the edge.
If it hadn’t happened that day, it would have happened later. I would have reached the breaking point. Even so, I am grateful for the smoke that blew me out of the tunnel and into the arms of my old friend Ricardo de la Cadiz Blanca, a great hero of the Resistance.
From A Baroness by Night
BY LILY DE ROSSIGNOL
TO SAY THAT it was a confusing time is to put i
t mildly. No one knew what to do about the war and the Nazis and so forth. Later hardly anyone knew why they did what they did. Or what they did, for that matter. Most French people, including myself, settled on a story, stuck to it, and more or less believed it. I wish I could say that I returned to Paris from the south because my country was being trampled by swine. I wish I could pretend that I burrowed into the belly of the pig to fight the pig from within.
But the truth is that I went back to Paris for personal reasons, out of loyalty and love for my husband, Didi de Rossignol.
We’d heard that people were trickling back. Paris was safe, if you were French and rich and white and of course not Jewish. One needed a permit to return to the capital. As a Hungarian, Gabor needed a special permit. I reminded him that one could work miracles by offering the lawyers triple their normal fees. It was easier for his girlfriend. Her mother was in Paris, and Suzanne planned to resume her “career,” teaching French to Nazis.
For some time I had been feeling the breath of that old dragon, boredom, toasting the back of my neck. There was nothing to do in the south, unless you liked to garden. After the war I saw Sartre’s play No Exit, about those hysterics brutalizing one another in their one-room hell. I remember thinking we’d been fortunate at the château. At least Sartre wasn’t there to lecture us about the meaning of existence. Hell, in that case, really would have been other people.
One night Didi phoned and said, Good news! We’d sold a car to some big shot Nazi. Then he said it again. Good news. He was trying to tell me something.
I remembered a dirty joke he used to think was terribly funny. I’d forgotten the details, but it was about sex and hell. The punch line was the devil saying, Good news, and describing an eternity of some grotesque sadomasochistic torture. Didi was telling me in code: he’d sold a sedan to the devil.
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 Page 32