Because, afterwards, he could not sleep he stood for a long time at his window feeling strange, feeling the breeze on his hair, staring at the full moon, which lit everything up. He might turn into a werewolf. He unbuttoned his pyjama top, let the moonlight cover him. Hair would grow all over his body and claws erupt. His skin was already crawling. The beach was so white that he was not sure at first if the figure at the water’s edge staring out to sea was real or not. It was a ghostly apparition that shimmered in and out of the silvery water, going forward and back, ever farther and deeper. Was it going to swim away or drown itself? Then he recognised her. Fräulein Lore was the werewolf.
SEVEN
Paris, June 1940
Anti-aircraft batteries rattled all the time; the distant boom was the Germans bombing factories and airports outside Paris. No bombs had hit the centre, the announcer said. One ear pressed to the radio to blank out the whine of aircraft, Ilse listened to announcements of great French successes. The Germans had been decimated in battles to the north, the “glorieuse Armée” had triumphed. The evacuation of the British from Dunkirk had been achieved “successfully” using an armada of British boats; French forces were “successfully” holding the enemy in check. The RAF was conducting numerous “successful” sorties against the enemy. Albert, surely, was safe in London now. She switched the radio off.
Bathed in a beautiful June light, Paris was deserted. The concierge had left. The landlady disappeared and nobody came to collect the rent. Most shops had put their shutters up. Luckily Albert’s money had bought tins of meat and fruit and dry goods and rusks, butter and oil. The boulangerie was still open. Returning home with two warm baguettes, Ilse passed a queue of women standing in the street, each holding a dog or a cat. The long row stretched round their corner and to the doors of the veterinary surgeon. In the room, she sliced the bread, spread it recklessly with butter.
“What were they doing?”
“Putting the animals down.”
“Poor animals.”
“They’ve grown soft. The last time the Parisians defended their city, it was a siege,” Otto said. “They ate them all, to the last cat and rat.”
Lunch was a tin of ham with potatoes and haricots verts. Otto drank his glass of wine and then permitted himself a second. Because there was nowhere to buy wine and only a few bottles left, he had been rationing himself for a week. They even shared a chocolate bar.
“What are we celebrating?” she asked.
“That it’s not rat.”
Signs like mushrooms sprang up everywhere: CITOYENS! AUX ARMES! The radio announced that Mussolini had declared war on Great Britain and France. “The people of Paris are ready to defend their city to every last stone and lamp-post,” the announcer said. They should prepare for street fighting. Her father spoke of manning the barricades, said that she would hide while he fought. She looked at him, incredulous. There were no soldiers anywhere. All they saw from the window was one old lady carrying a shopping bag. Otto had another swig of his wine, pointed to her and laughed.
“What’s funny?”
“The troops are out in force. Nothing’s funny. I need a gun.”
She thought of the pistol he had kept locked in the drawer of his beautiful modern desk in the Landsweg until the Gestapo took it away; she remembered the cherry-wood panelling and the glass-fronted cabinet. He went out, saying that Ilse had to stay behind and keep the door locked. She sat at the window and looked out for two hours, thinking in a kind of dull stupor that he would be arrested and taken away, and that she would never see him again. Otto returned. He said that he had spotted half a dozen stray Tommies drinking tea out of big tin mugs and looking cheerful. “The French forces must be here. They are lying low,” he said.
The next morning, even the boulangerie had closed and no trams or buses ran. The only sound was the barking of stray dogs. The electric light flickered and when, in the evening, she wanted to cook potatoes, there was no gas. In the night they smelt a sharp smell and woke on Wednesday to find a thick pall of smoke filling the sky.
“They might have set the city on fire—to defend it,” he said. “Why no alarms? Why didn’t they warn us?”
By the middle of the morning the smoke had gone; the sun shone once more. Everything seemed very unreal. The radio announced that the government had left Paris and that it had been declared an open city. As she translated, Otto flew into a fury, kicking over the saucepan of water for the potatoes.
“What’s an open city?”
“The bastards are handing it over. There’ll be no defence, they’re abandoning Paris to the Germans. Abandoning their capital without firing one shot. It’s impossible.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going now,” he said. “Immediately.”
A hot jet of bile rose in her gorge. “Now?”
“I would have fought for Paris,” he said. “Cowards. All cowards.”
Mechanically, she picked up the potatoes, some of which had rolled under the bed, looked at his feet tracking water across dry floorboards. With angry haste, her father started putting his few things into the small case and filling it up with tins of food. He kicked the wardrobe door shut. The automaton Ilse collected the rest of the food together and said nothing. He went out first. She picked up her case; once more she carried it down the five floors to the street door. Her father carried the bag and the cooking gear plus the potatoes, staggering under the load. They waited for a long time near the bridge, but there was no hope of a taxi. They would have to walk to the station. They set off, carrying the sack of potatoes between them. Ilse wore her coat, which was so hot that she began to feel giddy and sick. She took it off and her father carried it for her. For a while, neither of them spoke.
“Where are we going?” She would not look at him as she asked. “Dunkirk, I suppose?” She spat the words out with fury. It was far too late, didn’t he realise anything?
“They’re coming from the north,” Otto said. “We’ll head south. What’s the nearest station?”
“Montparnasse.”
From several streets away it was obvious that others had had the same idea. Along the approach roads to the Gare Montparnasse, the crowd became so thick that they could not get anywhere near. Men and women stood shoulder to shoulder, the ground jammed with their suitcases; weeping or listless children clung to their parents. Ilse and Otto eased their way into the line, still carrying the sack of potatoes. When they stopped they rested it, now against her legs, now against Otto’s. Her arms ached and so did her feet; she longed to sit down but did not dare. Grimly, the crowd pressed forward up the gentle incline. The people seemed sullen, hostile even. Something hard in her father’s raincoat pocket kept pressing against her hip. After some time it occurred to her that he must have found himself a gun. This scared her. She worked her way round him, so it was on the other side. The blank hopelessness of it kept coming over her in waves, alongside incredulity that her father had actually remained in Paris in order to fight.
Rumours went back and forth: there would be trains in the evening, somebody said. The trains were running but they were not long distance, said another. They were just shunting people out to the suburbs, shuttling back and forth to clear the station. No, they were going south, right to Marseilles, not stopping anywhere. An old man kept repeating that they would all have to spend the night there, in the open, where the Germans could bomb them. A woman with bleached blond hair and a shrill voice said that she knew it on good authority from her cousin who lived there that the Germans had set the northern suburbs on fire. The Germans were going to torch Paris, section by section, until they surrendered. By the late afternoon, when they had hardly moved more than a couple of dozen metres, more and more people began to sit down until most were sitting on the pavement and in the road, leaning on their bundles and suitcases. A sudden screaming sound came from up ahead. They craned to see. Another scream came, the extreme noise of great pain. Two women stood holding up a blan
ket and a coat. Some poor woman was giving birth, right there on the pavement. Up ahead, an old grandmother held in her arms a baby that was clearly dead; flies kept settling on it and from time to time the old woman, who mostly just stared ahead, came alive and swatted at them, kissing the little face with passion. A thick-set man in a railway porter’s uniform came stepping through. People accosted him, cajoling or shouting, demanding to know what was going on. He said he had no information.
“Go away! Go away all of you! They’ve blown up the railway lines! No trains can get out!”
Nobody believed him.
By ten o’clock in the evening, pressing on inch by inch with the mass, they had got inside the station but no closer to the trains. It was impossible to get anywhere near the guichets where tickets were sold. A woman beside them told another that no ticket was given without a French identity card. But without a ticket there was no chance of a train. Only one train had apparently left that afternoon, jammed solid with people, and another, equally jammed, was standing in a siding, but there was no chance of getting on it, nor of finding out where it might be going. A new rumour swept the crowd: that the Germans were already in Paris and had begun to massacre the population. There was an enormous surge forward, women started screaming and fainting. Ilse saw a child pushed to his knees, crushed, his face disappearing. Then she saw a baby being passed over the heads of the people, shifted from hand to hand, then another, bigger child. The gendarmes were ordering that all children were to be passed forward over the heads of the crowd to a place of greater safety. Everyone started shouting and calling out names. She looked up at the huge vault of ceiling, where there was all the space anyone could need.
Ilse was hungry and her throat was desperately dry. She looked at her father, crushed against her side. She did not dare address him, even in whispers. A vein was throbbing above his left eye like a blue worm under the skin. She started to shove and squeeze through the crowd to fetch water. It took over an hour of pushing to get to the Red Cross post thirty metres away. There was a nurse there, giving a drink to children, dozens of them on their own collected together. She saw that the small ones were howling, some seeming ill.
“Please,” Ilse said, “can I have water?”
Wordlessly, the woman held out a mug. Ilse took it and turned to go.
“Oh no,” she said, “I need that.”
Ilse drank. She could smell soup, her mouth watered, but she had to get back to her father. Outside, she thought, behind the shuttered shops, Paris was full of food. It took so long to get back; people were lying down now and she felt a kind of panic that she might not recognise him among the bundles of clothes. Then she spotted the suitcase, the one she had bought him. Between the heat of bodies and the cool night air, the cold concrete floor, which made her spine ache, and the smell of unwashed people, the night was got through somehow. There was the occasional flash as gunfire, far away, lit the dark sky. She even slept, waking around three o’clock. She listened to the conversations around them. The train they had hoped for had left. No other train had come in.
Otto kept squeezing her elbow, then struggled to his feet, indicating that she should stand. He began to climb over the sleepers. Silently, unable to remonstrate, she was forced to follow suit. She thought of Willy, standing tall and shouldering his way through a crowd with her suitcase on his head, then looked at the stooped figure of her father. It took a long time and her feet were burning, her mouth was like dust, her head thudding. Bit by bit, the crowd parted and let them out. As soon as they got to a place with slightly fewer people she pulled at him, put her mouth close to his ear.
“You don’t want to try?”
“No. It’s impossible. The Germans will be here before a train leaves.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Go back.”
“Where? The pension? The south? Germany?”
He tugged her on. Outside, a car started hooting at the mêlée around the station; they moved out of the road to let it pass. A bunch of men ran after it and then surrounded it, shouting “Salauds.” There was a middle-aged couple inside, looking terrified. The mob pulled them out and started beating and kicking them. Ilse looked away from the flailing fists, the boots, the thud of flesh being damaged, the woman’s face puffing up, the pretty blue dress ripping as she fell.
“What did they do?”
“Belgians,” said her father. She remembered that a few weeks back, when Belgium surrendered, the radio had said they were all traitors. They walked on, the crowd thinning. A few minutes later the car passed, accelerating away, now full of men. Away from the station, the city was deserted.
It was broad daylight when they arrived back at the room. Too tired to unpack, Ilse lay down fully dressed on the bed. Her whole body ached. She fell asleep immediately. Otto tried to persuade her to get up but she could not and when he saw how worn out she was he desisted. She rose each time from the darkest and blackest sleep to the same nightmare. She was on a cliff and terrified, but unable to move, knowing that one step would dash her to the rocks below. With all her strength she tried to turn, but could not. She could not even make a single sound. At last, the dream receded and she fell asleep once more. She did not get up until the evening and even then, washing in cold water, she only had the energy to swallow a few mouthfuls of fruit from a tin before going back to bed. Even this luxury could not revive her. She listened. Paris was as still as death; all the dogs must have died.
“Are you ill?”
“No.”
She fell back into the blackness.
The sudden roar of a motorbike racing by somewhere near woke Ilse. A heavy, rusty, scraping sound arose to a thunderous squealing that went on and on and on. After the long silence it was shocking.
“What is it?”
“Tanks.”
The Germans had arrived. There was no gas to light the ring so they drank a little cold water, filled water bottles and prepared to go. He picked up her case and frowned.
“Why so heavy?” Ilse said nothing. He saw that she had put in three of Albert’s books. She so wanted to take him with her.
“These will finish us, if the Wehrmacht31 stop us.”
She nodded. She arranged them with his others in a neat line on the table.
“Come on.”
Once more, Ilse plodded down the stairs. Crossing the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the noise of the trucks and tanks was tremendous. With the bag of potatoes once more slung between them they crossed the Rue St. Dominique in the direction of Montparnasse, skirting the crowded area near the station. Ilse nudged her father in the correct direction. Looking left as they passed Les Invalides, Ilse saw the glint of shiny metal. A long column of German troops was drawn up along the huge square in a formal line. They were presenting arms, bayonets glittering in the sun. They could not have fought a battle: their boots shone and they were immaculate. Then, yet more incongruous, she saw that opposite them there was a whole line of policemen drawn up, French policemen looking correct in their proper uniforms with their white batons, as though they were all part of a military display, their faces as rigid as waxworks.
“What is it?”
“A formal surrender. Cowards. Come on.”
German soldiers were everywhere, truck after truck of young men each holding a rifle between his knees. They looked young and tired. Some were fast asleep and only woke as the truck jerked to a halt. Behind each convoy of trucks roared motorcycles with sidecars. Other people had come out onto the streets: French men and women stood like statues. As they trudged by, Ilse noticed that most of the women were weeping. The men stared at the invading army with dazed expressions. All the time the tremendous noise continued. She understood it now. It was the scrape of tanks bumping over cobblestones.
A huge black Mercedes limousine passed. They carried on, always choosing the side streets just behind the main boulevards. Ilse guided them using her mental map of the city’s landmarks, turning not towards the Luxembourg Gardens but aw
ay, following the signs for Montparnasse. When they were past the cemetery, they would head south towards Châtillon. Her feet hurt. Her hand sprouted blisters. She said nothing.
In every avenue, men were setting up machine guns.
A small car drove past with a loudspeaker blaring out a wireless announcement in such good French, she could not believe it was a German talking. “No demonstration is permitted while our troops march in. The Paris police will function normally. Any hostile act will be punishable by death.” Troops in another car going very slowly were giving out leaflets to people. They took them awkwardly; nobody read them, but they dared not crumple them either. A passing truck suddenly braked and came to an abrupt halt just in front of them. Half a dozen soldiers jumped out, one carrying a ladder. Beckoning frantically, Otto disappeared into the next courtyard. Ilse was frozen to the spot. One young man went up to a poster and tore it down. It was one of the French war-bond posters, with the slogan “We shall win because we are the stronger.” Another man followed with a big roll of paper under his arm and a pot of paste. Expertly, he unfurled the roll, stepping up onto the ladder. Dipping in a long brush, he pasted up a brightly coloured image of a smiling German soldier holding a scruffy urchin in his arms while others clustered round. He had evidently just given the little girl a tartine and she was biting into it and smiling. “Populations abandonées,” the poster read, “faites confiance au soldat allemand!”32 With another dip of the brush, he slicked over it and admired his handiwork.
Noticing Ilse, the first young soldier waved. “You’re free, Mademoiselle, to go wherever you like,” he said in excellent French. Then he reached into his pocket and smiled. “Would you like some chocolate?”
The Children's War Page 15