“Komm herein, mein Schatz,”45 said La Petite Louise. She said this to everyone, even the English soldiers who came in drunk from the bars on the quai. Prisoners of war were locked up in Fort Saint-Jean, but the French guards let them out on day passes.
“Herein!”
She had sharp little yellow teeth like a rat and a boy’s figure. Though she scared Ilse, she was always friendly, always seeking company. She was not unlike a Toni, or rather a Toni that might have been. There was another Louise, known for obvious reasons as La Grande, a country girl who hardly ever opened her mouth. On the few occasions when she did, she had a strong accent of the Midi. La Petite’s door was always half open, to hook in passers-by for a chat. Some of the girls appeared simpleminded or just strange. Ilse worried that one of them might one day reveal to a German client that she and Otto were there.
“We won’t tell. Anyway, I’m the darling of the German Commission. We’re more afraid of Renée.” She laughed. La Petite looked so much better when she did not smile, though Ilse could hardly tell her so.
“Why?”
“Don’t cross her and you’ll never find out. She has a finger in every pie in Marseilles. Knows all the big shots. Gangsters and so on. She trades her information, does her deals. Of course, she loves money. Don’t we all,” and she lit a cigarette and mimed flicking through a thick wad of it. La Petite was brewing coffee on a little gas ring in the corner. It smelt very good. She always had real coffee, never ersatz.
“Want some?”
It was dark and delicious. Gratefully, Ilse sipped it.
There was a sharp knock at the door.
“I can smell contraband. Come out at once. Customs!”
“Raymond!”
A small man, laughing, ducked his head and pretended to charge like a bull, pointing fingers for horns. La Petite embraced him. He was a real Marseillais, stocky and short and full of cockiness. Thick black hair grew on his arms and chest, springing forth with vigour.
“Ilse, you know Raymond? The brother of Paul. My friend Ilse— Raymond Leboeuf, look at him, a real bull.”
“Paul is the ox. I am more of a calf. You’re the girl from Germany. Paul told me about you.”
She could see the family resemblance; the oversized barman must dwarf him.
“What have you got for me, mein Schatz?”
“Coffee, sugar, tobacco.” Raymond winked. He drew a packet out from under his shirt. La Petite counted out notes, then poured him a cup. He lit up a cigarette. Ilse sniffed the strong smell of real Virginia tobacco.
“Raymond, Ilse and her father want to get out. Raymond works in the docks,” said La Petite.
“Where do you want to go?”
Hope sprang up at once.
“To Morocco, to my uncle, to Oran,” she said. “If we can get places on a boat.”
“Raymond will smuggle you out, won’t you, darling?” said La Petite.
But he was shaking his head. “They search every ship. The coast is patrolled by the Germans for illegal boats. They stop fishing vessels just beyond the port, they get a nice catch that way. But they don’t search soldiers, nor troopships. They’re the only ones.”
“Oh.”
“One thing, mind, I heard about Morocco. Some of the French soldiers being demobilised get free passage there, if that’s where they come from. Don’t look so sad. Something will come up.”
He had kind eyes. Ilse stored the information away. Later, she asked Renée about it.
“You think Vati could pass as a French soldier?”
They both looked at him. Clearly not.
It was wicked to waste money on a book, but what could she do? She could not join a library and did not have the nerve to sit in one without a card. She went to the big bookshop near the station that was always full. Scanning the yellow softbacks for something cheap, she chose a book by François Mauriac. Returning with her prize, Ilse very quietly drew back the curtain. She was curious to know how they managed to talk, when she was not there. They had not locked the door from the inside. Opening it noiselessly, she peeped in. Renée was kneeling on the bed astride her stretched-out father, her black dress pulled up around her waist and her mound of flesh engulfing him, his face in a rictus, his arms gripping her white thighs, her pink heels turned up.
Ilse stepped back. She heard him crying out, a hoarse sound. She went straight out of the house, marching with stiff knees to the top of the hill. Without seeing it, she looked down at the harbour. She did not feel anything very clearly. She was not even surprised. Renée was simple, made no demands, she was action and reaction, she was flesh. She was a whore. That was what whores did. It came to her that she had no memory of her mother and father doing anything like that. She did not remember her mother ever touching her father. In a little while, leaning against the side of a house, she began to read, brutally ripping the pages where uncut. The book was about an old man full of rage. It used many words she did not know, important words that in a moment, when she returned, she would look up in the dictionary Willy had given her. These angry words would be dwelt upon in silence; she would stretch them out and make them occupy the evening. The thunder of blood in her head was slowing. The stones were warm against her back. There was no hurry. Up here it stayed light until nine o’clock, when the alleyways below were dark. The door was open when she returned, but her father was not there. She sat listening to the noises of the house until, overcome by weariness, she lay down to sleep.
Otto had woken before her, was up and dressed.
“There’s so much to do.”
Ilse looked at him in blank amazement. Otto began to pace. He was going to start writing again: pamphlets which would be translated into French. The issue right now was the paper supply. A man Renée knew who came to the house could supply most things. Matters would be arranged. It had to be Raymond. Why did her father never tell her the important things? As usual, he treated her like a child.
“I need to learn French,” he said.
“So you can talk to Renée?”
“So I can talk to everyone.”
He seemed to be in an extraordinarily good mood. From his pocket he drew a pack of cards and started to shuffle them. Ilse recognised the Pierrot and Pierrette motif she had seen in Renée’s kitchen. He laid out the cards. The king of clubs came out, went down in the vacant position. But the hand then replayed itself, on and on, with no new cards to put anywhere. Doggedly her father, who had no patience at all, ran through the pack several times to be quite sure. His hands never stopped moving.
“Vati, now you’re feeling better, we have to get out of France,” she said.
“I like France,” he said.
“You like Renée.”
“She’s a fantastic woman. In another world, she’d have been an opera singer. She has the body for it.”
“Instead of the madame d’un lupanar.”46
“What’s that?”
She translated.
“Perhaps both.”
He was laughing. A red tide of rage swept up her face and she bit her cheek, so she would not say anything rash. She needed to be in his confidence, but the free way he spoke depressed her. She told herself to be clever, to be reasonable.
“We have to let Mutti know where we are. That’s the first thing. I’m going to write to Willy and ask for the address of those friends of his in Hamburg.”
“Willy enlisted. What a fool, at his age. You told me yourself. He’s probably in Algeria somewhere. Who knows?”
“But Toni will know where he is, she might have the address.”
“Ilse. Must we go through all this again?”
“But she needs to know about us.” She steadied her voice. “She wrote to me, you know she did. You tore the letters up.”
“All that’s past. Your mother could not bring herself to leave Germany. It’s a pitiful thing, but there it is.”
“You didn’t want to leave either.”
“I wanted to fight them from the ins
ide. Your mother’s a different case. She’s Aryan, she could not be one with the refugees and outcasts.”
This shocked her. Ilse felt the truth of this, a stab in her own body. She did not want to be a refugee either. This was a hard lump, which she could not swallow, a fishbone sticking in her throat.
“But I want to write to her.”
“No. In any case, we have no address. She never gave it to me. She has severed her connection with the underground. Even if I knew where she was, I would not permit it. It’s not safe.”
She did not believe him. He knew how to twist words to his advantage. The conversation, like so many with her father, was meant to go differently. The faint sound of the cards went on and on. She picked up the Petit Marseillais. The newspapers carried page after page of classified advertisements, families trying to find one another: lost brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers who might never see one another again. She looked at the small print with eyes that would not focus. She had chosen her father, though she did not much care to be with him and she could not trust him to save her.
She pressed her old school dress and cleaned her shoes, which were very tight. She was growing, even her feet were. She got out her set of fine Aryan papers. That was the first on her list when, desperate to fall asleep, she ran through her possessions in ascending order of importance. Last of all and most precious was the photograph of her mother, which she now kept safe in her suitcase inside the cupboard. The American embassy was at No. 6 Place St. Ferréol. It was not hard to find: an enormous queue of people stretched all down the street, and right round the corner and along the next street. Ilse attached herself to the back of it. After an hour, a man came down the queue telling people something. They began to melt away. Ilse was not near enough to understand him. When people stayed, he came over and explained it again: this was not the place for visas. This office was for Americans. They had to go to the visa office at Montrédon, in the outskirts of Marseilles.
Early the next morning she crept out while the whole house slept. Others had had the same idea for the tram was jammed with people. They rode out into the hills, standing much too close for comfort. Sweat trickled down the back of her dress, gathered damply in the belt. She felt very conspicuous, when other children were at school, but nobody seemed to notice her. All the people on the tram got off at the same place and headed along the hot, dry road towards a big brick villa. Many people were already standing outside. Large notices were wired to the railings: APPLICATIONS FROM CENTRAL EUROPE ARE NOW CLOSED. Another read: VISAS VIA SOUTH AMERICA CURRENTLY SUSPENDED. She joined the end of the queue. The next tram brought another sardineload of hopefuls. A lot of the women were dressed up, wearing high heels, which the dusty road covered with a fine powder.
Germans in the queue talked to each other. It was odd to hear her language spoken so freely. As they shuffled slowly forward, Ilse listened to them exchange information. To exit by sea seemed to be most people’s hope but all passages from Lisbon or Marseilles to any place outside Europe were sold out for months in advance. They talked about the exchange rate and the impossibility of buying dollars even at the official rate. A woman, shrill and sharp-faced, who reminded Ilse a little of Frau Wolff, was standing just in front. They fell into conversation.
“Do you have your transit visa?”
Ilse shook her head.
“But you’ve got the American visa?”
Ilse looked at her feet. The woman looked at her pityingly as she explained the system. First she had to obtain the visa for America— generally considered impossible. Only with the American visa could she apply for Portuguese and Spanish transit visas. With a boat ticket from Marseilles, one did not need the transit visas, but the only ships leaving Marseilles were French ships for Oran and Algiers. Tickets on these could only be bought for dollars and special permission was needed, which foreigners were unlikely to get since only Vichy officials were permitted to go to Africa. Without exit visas, you couldn’t put your name down for any ticket.
“I queued for three days just at the Spanish consulate,” the woman said. The Portuguese visa was essential to get the French exit visa. That was given only by the Vichy government. “In other words,” she whispered, “it’s all controlled by the Gestapo.”
Ilse smiled and nodded and said thank you and stood, dully, in the queue for another hour, for some stupid reason too proud to do the obvious thing, which was to walk away. Rattling back down into town, the tram was empty, and she took a seat and stared out. Walking disconsolately along the Canebière, her eye was caught by a woman rolling down the blinds of a patisserie. It was a café too, a big, pretty one with a yellow and blue striped canopy and little tables inside. She stood on the street outside and looked at it, feeling the sun on her shoulders. An image of the braided head of Frau Ginsberg and of her lilac gloves floated into her mind. Her mouth was suddenly watering. She could almost taste the apricot pastries. She could see the sisters waving, the handle of the leather bag and the clear light of Oran. Suddenly, she wanted Willy so badly.
Walking nearer, she saw the window was nearly empty. There could be no pastries when there was no butter and no eggs. On the glass shelves stood a dozen gaudy confections. These were cakes—if you could call something a cake that was made without eggs, butter, sugar or flour. They were a mass of solidified pink foam with a cherry on top. She was staring at them without really seeing them, rather seeing herself reflected there. It took much longer than it should have for her to discern, inside looking out, the tall ugly man whose mouth, like that of a fish, opened and closed, and who was waving like a madman. Albert came out into the street and put his arms round her. She saw tears in his eyes. He drew her back inside and they sat at a table near the door. He blew his nose loudly several times. He came here for breakfast each day, he said. But for the visit to the American embassy, she would never have seen him.
“You should be in England,” she said. “Beautiful skin, rotten teeth.” He patted her hand. “What are you doing here?”
“I was an idiot to think I could get out—the British left behind forty thousand French troops at Dunkirk, and some of their own. I’d left it too late. So I made my own way down here durch Nacht und Nebel,”47 and he squeezed her hand. A curious little tingle went right through her. “And you, my darling girl?”
“We got out at the last minute,” she said. “You know.” The journey from Paris was something she wanted to suppress forever. “Albert, I don’t suppose you could afford a cake?”
They had four of the cakes that tasted of froth and coffee made out of barley ground fine, sweetened with saccharine that left a sour aftertaste. She ate three cakes; he crumbled one, laughing that she had such an appetite.
“How old are you now?”
“Much older. Fourteen and a bit.”
He was amused. “Oh, so much older.” With one good eye, Albert seemed to look at her. The other was fixed on the door. “I’m nervous for you,” he said. “Any foreigner without a sauf-conduit48 is sent to a concentration camp immediately.”
“Nobody sees me.”
“I saw you. Don’t you read the newspapers? The French are already cracking down on Jews. They have made themselves a nice Statut des Juifs, so they can round them up more easily.”
“Don’t worry,” she said airily. “I’m en règle. Sort of. Anyway, I’m not Jewish.”
“Indeed. And you’ll be interested to hear that I’m now Czech,” he said.
Albert really was en règle. He had a fine, expensive new passport from the Czech consul in Marseilles in an unpronounceable name; he took it out of his cream linen jacket and showed it to her as they walked down towards the port. She admired its pink cover and gold stamp, the visas for China and Siam and, most important, a sauf-conduit from the military authorities. Albert had been promised a visa for America. With his pass, he could leave France and wait for the visa anywhere: in neutral Lisbon perhaps, or somewhere safer along the Portuguese coast. From America, he could go any
where in the world. But he had not gone. Only one in ten thousand really understands, she told herself.
“But why haven’t you left?”
“I’ve been working. Ilse, something important has happened. The book—I’m going to finish it. I’ve started to write again.” He had been working on “the” book for years, on and off. “Or rather, I could finish it, if I had someone. A special girl to read back to me what I’ve written.”
Deep joy surged up. The sun shone and the boats with their gay pennants danced upon the water. He would not go to America; only the book mattered. For the book, for her, he would stay in Marseilles. She could have danced up the Montée des Accoules.
The door was locked from the inside.
“We can’t go in just now,” she said. “Vati and the madame. You know,” she said, shrugging. Albert raised his eyebrows. In Renée’s kitchen, she put water on to boil for tisane. A big piece of meat sat on a plate to one side in a pool of blood, covered with a net dome to keep off flies; alongside were a dozen eggs. When she turned, Albert’s good eye swivelled from these luxuries back to her.
“My friend!”
Otto and Albert embraced. Renée was just behind. They shook hands and Albert looked from Otto to Renée and back again, and Ilse saw her father’s face set. For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Renée went out and everyone spoke at once. Ilse explained how she had run into Albert and where he was staying.
“Albert’s going to America. He’s just waiting for his visa,” she said.
“You’d better be careful. Vichy controls all the exits. Walk over the mountains into Spain and hope not to be caught—that’s your way out, on foot through Lisbon. Forget the papers.”
“It sounds much too energetic, my dear Otto.”
“You’ll catch the express, will you? From the Gare St. Charles, where the police have set up a permanent barrier?” Her father was laughing at Albert. “You and your papers. Clinging to a world that’s gone. To a belief in order, it’s incredible. What are these papers?”
The Children's War Page 21