Carefully Ilse shook all the little white squares back into the envelope. Her hands were very dirty and smeary, she noticed, the nails black with dirt. The place where the thorn was embedded still throbbed, but it no longer concerned her. Climbing down once more, she went down into the ditch like a crab, sideways, so she could keep the leg with the scab straight, and looked for more paper. She went along the ditch for a long way in each direction without finding any. In the nettles there was something blue: Otto’s pyjamas. She picked them up. They smelt strong and unmistakably of him; there was his suitcase, open and upended. She rolled up the pyjamas and put them in the case. Ilse zigzagged back and forth across the road. She found her father’s shaving brush. She put this in the case. Of the tins of food there was no sign. There was a man coming. She stood behind the lorry until he was gone, slipping round the side as he approached. He did not see her. He was a crazy laughing man, walking down the middle of the road talking to himself. Back on the lorry, she stared at the empty road.
A small figure moving in the wrong direction, blurry against the heat coming off the road, gradually solidified into Otto. He must have been certain of her long before she was sure that it was him. She could tell from the way he lifted up his hands and signalled. He started to run towards her. As he approached the lorry, they were still held up in the ancient gesture of distress, of lost and found.
“I went to find shelter for us,” he said. “I lost my way. I signed to the driver to look after you.”
She said nothing. He leant against the truck, panting a little. Ilse stared past him.
“I couldn’t work out which way to go. I asked—of course, nobody understood what I wanted. Some fool thought I was a German spy. Thank God I found you. The best part of the day lost. I thought I would never see you again,” he said. “Can you get up?”
“I don’t know.”
He climbed up onto the back of the truck.
“Your leg,” he said.
“I fell. Did you shoot the spy?”
“No. Show me your hands.”
She held them out. He tried to pick out the thorns but they were in too deep, in any case his cracked yellow nails were too brittle to get a grip. The thorns were much worse than the knee.
He stroked her cheek. “I couldn’t wake you,” he said. “I thought, better let you sleep. Can you try to get up?”
“They took the food.”
He dug in his pockets: there was a piece of bread and an apple, a wizened thing. Out fell the other halves of the hundred-franc notes torn in two: the bribe to the driver, to take them. He folded the money, put it back in the pocket. She ate.
“Look at me,” he said, “managing to find something to eat. And I never was a practical man. Can you get up? We’re going to have to walk.” He climbed down, stretched out a hand. She could see that he was trying to be nice.
“Mutti wrote,” she said. “Somebody tore her letters up.” Her hand shook, holding out the scraps; it no longer looked like a part of her. “I’m not going anywhere if you don’t tell me what she said.”
“Let me jump you down.”
“No. I mean it,” she said. “I’ll stay here.”
Weary though he was, Otto started pacing in the road.
“Vati, please. Her exact words.”
“That I should send you back to her. That in Germany you would be safe.”
“The exact words. Please, please, tell me.”
“Your mother decided that in Germany you would be safe with her. Because she’s Aryan. She imagines she can conceal you. Remake you. With that new passport. It’s insane. I told her that. I see this, Ilse, as a gigantic conspiracy that she wanted a child, you, but not a man. Not me. Hitler made that possible.”
“I’m possible because of Hitler?”
“I mean she saw her chance. She thought she would get away with it.”
“Get away with what?”
He sat down with his back against the lorry. She leant forward, shadowing him. When she bent her knee, the blood started running again, so she straightened up. His hair was covered with dust and his face was very dirty. She probably looked the same.
“Vati. Get away with what?”
“Your mother wouldn’t divorce me. I don’t know why not. It was the most practical solution. For years she said we should all go abroad. She urged me to leave, to save myself. Of course, she knew that I had to stay in Germany, that I could not abandon the fight against fascism, I had sworn it on my life to my comrades. I told her that when I went underground. Then she sent for me. The last time I saw her she said I had to meet you in Paris. It was a last chance to redeem myself. We would be together, she said. We would be a family. Then, when she had persuaded me out of my country, she wrote to say she had changed her mind, that it would be better if we were apart. What a fool I’ve been. Duped on a false promise. I should have remembered that she hates me.”
Listening to his flat voice, Ilse was much too tired to argue. She made an effort, kept her voice steady. “I think that you hate her. I think you’re mad.”
Perhaps he was actually mad. Abruptly, she understood.
“Vati. How could you tear up her letters?” Then, when he did not reply, “She wrote to me, didn’t she?” She heard the outrage in her voice. “I’ll never forgive you. Never.”
“Ilse. That’s enough. Get down at once.” He spoke sharply. She pushed herself along to the edge of the lorry, struggled down. They started to walk. Ilse stumped along stiffly, determined not to speak. Otto remarked that a number of cars had been abandoned near a turnoff to a village. Perhaps there would be food there, or shelter. Walking was slow, for Ilse was having trouble keeping going. Rounding the last bend, she saw three old men sitting on upright wooden chairs, which they had brought out from their houses. All the other houses were shuttered and the shops closed, but these three sat in a row, to see the spectacle. The old men watched them plod slowly past.
At the end of the village a low wooden platform had been put up in a little square. A middle-aged man was overseeing the distribution of food. He wore a black suit in spite of the heat, around it a tricolor sash. People were queuing; they moved quietly to join them. Each was being given a metal dish, turnips, bread and salt. There was a mug to fill with water. On the other side of the square half a dozen soldiers with tattered uniforms sat in front of a little café, smoking and drinking. Little white cards were tacked up against the wooden posts of the platform, overlapping, from top to bottom, dozens of them. She read them.
Lost on the road near here on June 9th my son aged five Jacques Lemorel dark hair blue eyes: write to Madame Lemorel poste restante Chartres.
Madame Bois requests information about her daughters Marie-Hélène and Monique, eight and six, lost ten kilometres from Chartres. Response please to Chartres town hall.
The queue inched forward. Towards the front, a young man in a soldier’s trousers and jacket drew the eye. He was exceptionally tall, with blond hair so light that it was almost white. Something about him pulled at her. A moment later he turned and glanced directly at Ilse and then at Otto, then back at her. His eyes were very blue; he looked like the young man in the poster, the pinup for the Hitlerjugend. She watched him. The soldier balanced his piece of bread, his salt and his vegetables in the dish, then sauntered across to the café. He sat, lit a cigarette, flicked the match into the air. He actually smoked before eating: such lack of urgency seemed remarkable. The queue shuffled slowly forward. Ilse took her ration. “Your billeting slip,” the official said, handing her father a chit of paper. She took it from him. It was an address: Rue du Marché. She asked the official where they were: he said eleven kilometres from Chartres. They went to the far side of the square, away from everyone else, and sat on a low wall. Ilse forced herself to eat the bread slowly. It was dry country bread and very coarse. Eating made her feel so tired. She looked at the turnip. Who could eat a turnip raw? She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the blond soldier was squatting close besi
de Otto. He was saying something very quietly which she could not hear, but it had to be in German, for Otto nodded. How could he be French and German too? It was very interesting, but even so, her eyes could not stay open.
Otto was pulling at her arm, getting her to her feet. “We have to get to Marseilles. It’s the only overseas port still open,” he said. “We’ll head for Chartres. If we can get to the next village down the road we should be able to get transport.”
The young soldier who knew so much about where to go had not left. He was still in the square. He came out of the café with a glass of beer, sat down and started joking and talking to the other soldiers.
“I want to stay. I want to go to the Rue du Marché,” she said. “You go.”
“No. You’re coming,” he said.
They laboured along the stretch of road, following the sign for Chartres. In a while they heard the low rumbling of a motor. It passed them, going very fast—a shining black official car. With a squealing of brakes, it stopped fifty metres on. An arm beckoned, the white-blond head stuck out of the passenger-side window to smile at them. They hurried up to the car, her father wheezing with the strain, got in and propped their cases up on their knees. Of course, she thought, a gendarme would still have petrol.
“Il faut les aider, quand même, ces pauvres Flamands,”36 said the blond soldier to the gendarme at the wheel. He winked at her, indicating that she should say nothing. She could not think what quality it was Flemish people had that made others help them, when the Belgians were hated. He sat at his ease in the front, smoking and laughing with the gendarme, his arm stretched along the seat, the arm of a man among friends. The driver was a local man, young and friendly and excited; he had a round, freckled face. He seemed almost pleased that war had come at last. He drove as fast as the road permitted and asked many questions, and the blond soldier talked about troop movements and panzers and les sales Boches.37 Once the gendarme threw a remark over his shoulder at Otto. The blond soldier interjected, said something that made the other man laugh. He was called François. She stared at the way his hand with its faint dusting of pale hair lightly rode the seat and seemed to hold them too. She was supporting him, silently, by trying her hardest to appear normal.
“My God,” the gendarme said, every time they passed another column of straggling people labouring along with their possessions. “What chaos.” The local authorities had evacuated all the hospitals, the schools, everything. The lame and the sick were all on the road. Soon, he said, the Germans would overtake the whole lot of them. She rose from darkness as she felt the car slowing down. Her father slept, his head occasionally bobbing against hers. Another gendarme put his head in at the window; he and the driver knew each other.
“The panzers are twenty kilometres away at most.” He nodded his head at the soldier and looked towards Ilse.
“Hitchhikers,” said the driver, waving a cheery arm in their direction. The man grunted and waved them on.
The gendarme dropped the three of them somewhere on the outskirts of Chartres and pointed out the direction in which they were to walk. There was a great deal of traffic; cars passed going slowly, full of baggage and people.
“Rich Parisians,” said François. When, footsore, they reached the huge main square below the great cathedral Ilse saw that it was jammed with cars parked edge to edge. They stopped at a café, but could not find a single seat. It was the same at the next and the next, with bad-tempered people who were hungry like them standing outside. In front of every hotel was a big hand-lettered sign, saying that every room was taken. “The bourgeoisie got here first.”
François extracted a cigarette and took his time smoking it, looking around the Place des Epars. Ilse and Otto stood a little distance away. There was not even space on a park bench for them to sit. François ground out the cigarette. He came over, touched her shoulder. “Wait here, siostrzyszka,”38 he said. She watched as he headed into the biggest restaurant on the square, threading his way through the tables.
Otto and Ilse stood under the lime trees. A woman in high heels carrying a fur coat, incongruous in the heat, was making some kind of scene on the pavement. Her companion, a man in a suit sweating and dabbing at his bald head, stood ineffectually beside her, patting her arm. She stopped shouting. He put his arm round her and she started to cry. Eventually they walked on. Ilse watched, as if through a pane of glass. The dappled light made patterns on the dry ground, the trees were the fresh green of her beautiful best dress. If she half closed her eyes, she could see the bolt of velvet unrolling and being cut.
François touched her arm. He was laughing, balancing three deep soup plates of meat stew with a baguette under his arm. She saw three spoons tucked into his belt. “For our heroic boys. Come on.”
He led them over to the fountain. They sat on the rim. A small boy came up to her and looked at her plate. His mother called him away. The meat was savoury. Ilse gulped the first mouthful down. She saw a tiny bone. She pushed at it with her spoon. Otto was cramming the food into his mouth.
“What is it?” asked Ilse. “It’s not rabbit, is it?” Her voice sounded very small. She was so hungry. It looked wonderful but it had a telltale aroma. She would eat anything but she could not bear rabbit. If it was rabbit, she would throw up immediately.
“Eat,” said Otto. She put her spoon back onto the plate.
“Monkey,” said François. “In the glorious French army—currently existing in its individual scattered molecules and not as an entity—we live on it. We call all meat monkey. Monkey with potatoes, monkey with noodles.” She liked his voice, wanted it to go on.
“People don’t eat monkey,” she said. “Where are you from?”
“And you? What beautiful French,” he said. “If you eat, I’ll tell you. Can you guess?”
She picked up the spoon once more, took a spoonful, swallowed. She thought of all the mellifluous and romantic places.
“Pas-de-Calais to Tarn et Garonne,” she said.
“You funny girl. Paris, for my first ten years,” he said. “But really I am from Warsaw. My real name is Franciszek.” His smile transformed his beautiful but very serious face, lighting up his eyes. Perhaps he knew Toni; she wished that she had been told her maiden name. He was twenty-three, a student. He had got on a train to Paris to go and fight Hitler when the Germans invaded, had joined the Polish Legion. He broke off pieces of the bread, passed them to her. She used them to mop up the gravy. After the food, she felt so much better. All the time, he looked at everything all around them with his bright eyes that understood everything. With a stick, he drew pictures of birds and spiders in the dust. He used his spoon to feather the bodies of ostriches with silly necks and big eyes. He used her empty plate to carry water from the fountain, made a splash on the dusty ground and then turned it into a giant ladybird.
Her father was silent. He sat hunched forward and very still, warming himself in the sun. François traced a long squiggly line that could have turned into anything but chose to become the outline of Otto, his despairing arms gripped between his knees, somebody who could not be anything but Jewish. He saw her recognising it, started to erase it. She kicked at the dirt until the figure was gone. He seemed to know exactly what she was thinking. She felt embarrassed.
“In the fighting, did you kill lots of Germans?” she asked.
“No.” François got up and stretched his legs. “Let’s go.”
She had said a stupid thing. He was impatient now, probably eager to be rid of them. He walked on ahead into the back streets. Ilse, hurrying behind, found no moment to say how very sorry she was. A food shop was open. On the shelves were bags of flour and rice and tins; they bought sardines, as many as they could carry; François said they were rich in vitamins. They put them in their cases. He led them to a little park near the bus station. Otto sat down; his eyes closed and his chest rose and fell in a deep sleep. Ilse sat beside him. François went away into the bus station. With her arms round the case, Ilse also permitt
ed her eyes to close. She awoke abruptly, feeling a warm breath in her ear. The shadows were lengthening, the day cooler.
François spoke quietly. “There’s nowhere in Chartres for you to sleep. Stay here until the bus station opens at six. Then get on the bus, the first one that runs, and get out.”
“How do you know there’ll be a bus?”
“I asked.”
“Can’t we get a billeting paper? In the village, they gave the people those.” She shook Otto’s arm, but he did not wake.
“Do you have papers, proper papers?”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t risk anything, if I were you.”
“Not even for one night?”
He looked at her for a long moment. “Do you want to live?”
She nodded.
“Then ask yourself not what are the others doing, but what am I going to do? How do I get out? What’s the safest way? Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“One in ten thousand really understands. With no papers, you have to be invisible. Another thing. When you get to Marseilles, don’t go to the centre d’acceuil.39 They’re locking up all Germans. Find an out-of-the-way hotel. Get out of France as soon as you can. Do you understand?”
The Children's War Page 17