“Walk. Put your arm through mine. Hurry.”
“What is it?”
“Our great Maréchal Pétain is in town. Every hotel combed through—the police are locking everyone up.”
The distinctive outline of two gendarmes appeared on the far side of the quay, turning and starting to walk across in their direction.
“They never come this far.”
“Today they will. Every house. Do you have papers on you?”
She shook her head. A second knot of policemen stood over near the transporter bridge.
“Shit,” said François. “Quick, this way.”
They ducked into the next alleyway. Pulling at her arm, he led her into a nearby bar and out at the back. The barman looked, then turned his head away. François opened the door to the alleyway beyond, left it open. But they did not go that way. There was a second building, a storeroom at the rear. Cursing softly and continually in Polish, he pulled her into it. He switched on the light, looked. There was a narrow alcove, which could be used. Swearing and heaving, he pulled the heavy metal shelves loaded with tins forward to make space.
“Go in there.” He pushed Ilse into the corner. Then he turned off the light and squeezed himself next to her. Heaving and shoving, with breath rasping from the huge effort, he pulled the shelf a millimetre or two at a time. Then he paused, pulled it again. It was huge and fully loaded. He heaved again. It rocked, he caught it. Nothing fell. Slowly it scraped along the rest of the way. The alcove once more disappeared; the space was filled. Footsteps passed, then returned. The exit door rattled angrily. A moment later she heard the sound of somebody returning. The storeroom door was flung open; a light was switched on. She dared not breathe. Then somebody switched off the light and closed it. There was shouting in the distance. Somebody else put the light on again. This time, the door was left open. A cold draught eddied by. She understood not to speak or move.
Throughout these noises and commotions, Ilse stood with her cheek resting against his chest, her body jammed tight against his. She felt and heard his breathing gradually calming and the steady beating of his heart as it resumed its normal rhythm. She felt his breath on the top of her head and his whole body touching hers. Breathing as quietly as she could, she absorbed his distinctive scent. This combined the olive smell of his skin with a faint sweatiness and the odour of slightly dirty clothes in a way that was not at all unpleasant. It was a very male smell. She closed her eyes, all the better to feel and remain in this state of extreme happiness. Time passed. The room grew quiet.
It was after midnight when they got back to the house. He opened the door, told her to lock herself in quickly.
“Don’t tell Renée I went out, please, I’m not supposed to.”
He touched her nose playfully with one finger. “Who d’you think was so worried she sent me in search of you? I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ve had a tip-off. I think your father has been in Gurs all along.”
His footsteps echoed down the corridor. Then he was gone. Renée had been scared, and with good cause. The newspapers reported that tens of thousands of refugees and “dangerous elements” had been rounded up, to keep all potential harm out of the way of the Marshal of France. Many had been locked up for good, Renée said, and some of these poor people would never come back. Then she made the sign of the cross. The Lord looked after his own and God in his mercy had returned Ilse safe.
For a long time she could not sleep. For her fifteenth birthday Ilse had received a gift after all, an extraordinary one. Her father was alive, could be saved. François had risked everything to find her. Her life, which had slowed to a standstill, was starting again. She held a pillow against her and, eyes tight shut, concentrated on remembering the smell of him and trying to feel his warm breath on her cheek. She had complete recall of the rough stuff of his jacket, the faint stubbles on his cheek. Her body remembered. He was not like other men, the sort who came to the brothel. He was completely different.
The next day, she knew that François had come the underground way for the hand she shook was icy. “Bonsoir, Mademoiselle.” He smiled delightfully, though his teeth were chattering. He sipped a tisane, warming his hands while Renée counted out the huge sum of twenty thousand francs. Ilse waited for Renée to turn away. Then she signalled to François, an imploring pantomime. He did not understand, so she mouthed the words “Take me with you. To Gurs.”
Then he understood and winked. “I’m taking Mademoiselle. In case I don’t recognise him.”
“Good,” said Renée.
“We leave at four.”
“That’s good,” said Ilse as calmly as she could. It was almost frightening that they took her at her word. She went through her treasures: the photograph frame, the perfume, the brooch. These she left in the cardboard box on the table, so they would be easy for Renée to find. She imagined herself doing brave and remarkable things. But when morning came, she felt very tired and too young to do anything. She was not sure what she should take. In the end she just put her nightgown into the red leather case. She took soap and all the money she had. When François took off the beret, she saw that his hair, cut very short, was now a bright copper colour, just like hers. Even his eyebrows were red.
“Are you laughing at me, siostrzyszka?”
“What does that mean?” she asked, remembering exactly what it meant.
“You’re my little sister now,” he said and handed her an envelope. He had got a set of temporary papers for her and sauf-conduits, officiallooking documents with many stamps in them. They would not hold up to too much scrutiny, he said, but they would probably do. They were in the name of Laure Benoît. He was Luc Benoît. That he had by chance given her her mother’s name was a secret joy.
They could not take a train from Marseilles, where the stations were crawling with police. She stood beside a road going north until suddenly a lorry slowed down and his red head was at the window. The driver took them towards Aix-en-Provence; they would get a train there. He was a fat man, who talked too much. Ilse sat jammed beside the window, with François in the middle. Something about François made people tell him things.
“Thank God we lost the war,” the man said. “Or else we would still be governed by those left-wing fuckers of the Front Populaire. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a fucking communist. And a fucking Jew.”
Ilse bit her tongue. François just smiled and passed him cigarettes. In return for another ten, the driver agreed to be diverted to the station. At Aix, they waited together on the far end of the platform, companions on a bench. He lit a cigarette, blew a smoke ring, savouring the taste.
“Thank God for Raymond. What a pro. Best smuggler in the business.”
“How did you meet him?”
“Through friends. Friends of friends.”
“What happened to you, after Chartres?”
“I took the voie de terre.”65
“What does that mean?”
“I was demobilised, from the Polish Legion. Then I came to Marseilles.”
“What did you really do?”
“Mademoiselle, you are very nosy.”
“You can’t call me ‘Mademoiselle,’ ” she said with glee. “You have to call your sister ‘Laure.’ ”
They crisscrossed the countryside in small trains. The first night was spent south of Toulouse, in a station waiting room. It was very cold and she wondered at his ability to sleep.
“Do you believe in God, François?”
“Luc,” he said. “No. But I’m a Jew, absolutely and forever. Born one and I shall die one. It’s inalterable, what you are born.”
“Oh,” she said. She, of course, was born a nothing. Long ago, her father had said that François was “one of us.” Actually, it had never occurred to her that he was Jewish. Now it all made sense. She thought about it.
“Because Vati always says that religion doesn’t matter. He doesn’t believe in it.”
“For a Jew it does. If we abandon our God, then we’ve lo
st everything,” he said.
“But you just said you didn’t believe in God,” she said.
François laughed. “But what is there to say that he doesn’t believe in us?”
He stretched out on the wooden seat and fell back asleep at once. She stared at his hands with their long delicate fingers, the crooked fourth finger of his right hand with a bump on it where as a student he must have held the pencil too tightly. His long legs could not fit onto the bench and one foot twitched in the big workingman’s boot. She kept glancing back at his face, the curve of his mouth, his eyes in case they suddenly opened. There was something cruel about the red hair that made him look peculiar, the strong colouring against his honeyed skin gave him the air of a made-up man, a beautiful clown.
They spent the second night in a village called Pontacq, beyond Tarbes, to be fresh for the visit to the camp, which lay between Pau and Oloron. It was a scruffy place, straggling houses on scrubland with chickens running wild. There was a bare farmhouse with a couple of tables in the front room that called itself an inn. It had a stinking latrine at the back that half the village seemed to use. The husband was off somewhere, the wife keeping shop. François joked and charmed her into wringing the neck of one of her precious chickens to make them a good supper. They had not eaten that day and the smell of the chicken roasting made her mouth water. She watched François take his plate over to the young woman and sit beside her. Ilse stripped flesh from bone. Her appetite was fading and she wanted to look away from their greasy smiles. The woman bent flirtatiously to light his cigarette, brushed against his arm as she offered another glass of wine. Upstairs, keeping her eyes tight shut and lying with the heavy pillow over her head, she could shut out neither the woman’s cries of pleasure nor the heavy rocking noise of the marital bed. The cheap romances Renée had given her described courtships full of misunderstandings and reconciliations, always leading to a kiss and the promise of marriage. Those things only happened in books. Real life was much closer to the brothel.
In the morning, on the last train, she fell heavily asleep and François had to shake her awake as the train drew into a small, pleasant-looking town. This was their destination, Oloron Sainte-Marie. They crossed a narrow bridge, then waited a long time for a bus, which never came. They walked. It had rained heavily here, and the ground was wet and hard going.
“Remember,” François said. “Poor Alain is my brother-in-law’s brother.”
“Poor Alain.”
Poor simpleminded Alain loved children but was never usually let out on his own. In the confusion of the times, a simpleminded person could be lost anywhere, could be picked up and would not know where he was or why. This was their excuse, so they could look for Alain through every camp.
The land was an endless flat swamp, cut in two by a dead straight road. The camp stretched into the distance, flanked with thick barriers of rolled barbed wire to keep people both in and out. All was mud, except for the road, which, rising a metre above the plain, was good tarmac with a thick layer of dirt on it. Beyond lay more wire and rows of makeshift barracks. There was not a single tree to be seen, not a blade of grass. Just people and earth like a woodcut of the Day of Judgement she had seen in a museum long ago, in which the flat earth split asunder to reveal hellfires. All the prisoners here were women and some came running over when they saw the two of them toiling along. A sudden buzzing noise grew louder and a small plane came over the camp swooping low. All the women turned to the plane and looked and waved— some even cheered. One woman in the crowd kept on waving after the others had stopped. She kept pace with them, staring at Ilse.
“Hello, my dear!” she kept calling in German. “My dear—do you have makeup? Lipstick? You see—I have a rendezvous with a gentleman.” She laughed and pointed up at the sky.
Ilse shook her head. “I don’t wear lipstick,” she said in French.
“You can just throw it over to me,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I don’t have any.”
“Goodbye,” said the woman, turning away and walking off very upright on her high heels, which sank into the mud.
Two hundred metres from the gate, a rough-looking wooden hut served as a bar and shop. François told her to wait outside. She got out the rosary beads the priest from La Sainte Trinité had given her and started to say her catechism. She needed to be patient while they waited for the sergeant François knew to come on duty.
It was some time before François emerged with a man in uniform, a thickset man who looked at Ilse and smiled. “So this is the little nun,” he said.
Ilse liked that.
Well-fed and friendly, the sergeant had a direct and open way about him. All the way past the gates and through the maze of barbed wire he chattered on. He was a farmer’s son, one of five, born and bred in the Pyrenees. The farmland was poor, he said, it did not have enough work for all the boys of his family. What was a man to do to earn a living? Gurs, he said, was the major holding centre for German prisoners, for politicos and troublemakers generally. Most of the riffraff picked up in Marseilles and along the coast would end up here. The guards worked harder and longer hours than in any camp in France, yet, he said, this work paid so badly. Out of sight of the offices and other guards, he smilingly pocketed a big roll of francs.
The men’s part of the camp was a couple of hundred metres on. They went from one block to the next, peering into each barrack. Each section held dozens of crude wooden huts with shallow ditches round them. There were not even windows, just holes where glass should have been, wet places on the mud floor inside where the rain came in. The men sitting or lying here looked stubbly and grey, thin and very dirty. There was no place to put anything, no tables or chairs, just rows of soiled mattresses stuffed with straw directly on the damp floor. Some read, others played cards, many just wandered around. Some men looked up as they passed but most seemed too lethargic even to look. Each place offered another view of hopelessness, of misery.
“What do these poor devils eat?”
“Bread, a loaf each day. Vegetables, mostly chick peas, a little soup. It’s difficult, in war, to feed them properly.”
“What about heat?”
The sergeant shrugged. There were no stoves. It had been a bitter winter and though it was now April the weather had scarcely improved.
“Can they get extra food, if they have the cash?”
The sergeant looked at him. “You know, Monsieur, anything can be bought.”
There was a further section of the camp François pointed to, one set apart and flanked by a double layer of wire. A couple of gaunt figures stood there, looking out.
“Ah, you can’t go there. That is the barracks of the undesirables. You know. Political prisoners.” He made an unmistakable throat-slitting gesture.
“Can we look?”
He shook his head. “Your relative couldn’t possibly be there.”
In the next block, a bearded old man in a coat flapping like a scarecrow’s jumped up and started grunting and capering around.
The sergeant laughed. “There’s one of our crazies. We can’t get a word out of him. I don’t suppose that’s your madman,” he said.
“Yes,” said Ilse suddenly, gripping François’s arm and squeezing it very tight. “That’s him.”
She stood stock-still. His hair was very long. His face looked so ravaged and desperate, one eye looking past her and the other at some distant place where he had never wanted to go. Albert came forward and seized Ilse, staggering a little, and with the desperate cunning of the newly resurrected swung her round, pressing his beard against her in an insane embrace.
“Otto’s not here. Gone, sent away,” he whispered. “Get out.” His voice was thick and rusty.
“Come on,” she said, taking his arm. He smelt bad. He staggered. She began to lead him towards the door. Somebody in the barracks started to shout. A couple of men came running up and seized her arm, too, as if she could take anybody she chose. She saw François’s face, a
live with intelligence and looking at them.
“It’s him,” she said again.
Between them, they held him up.
“Say nothing,” she said to Albert under her breath.
“The idiot brother,” she heard the guard saying.
“Brother-in-law’s brother, not in my family line,” said François. How clever he was to deny the bloodline. As they came out into the air, François took a lot more money from his pocket and stuffed it in the pocket of the sergeant’s uniform, very quickly and deftly. It was done before they rounded the corner into sight of the other guards. “My friend,” he said, “this poor fellow is very sick, as you can see. It would be good to get him to the hospital with as few formalities as possible.”
With Albert stumbling between them, they walked towards the main gate. They paused twenty metres away and the sergeant went up to the guard at the gate, pointing to them. More money changed hands. In just a moment the guard waved them through. And their luck held: a bus could now be seen heading towards them. Sitting at the very back, Ilse held on to Albert’s arm more gently. His eyes closed, he seemed half unconscious. Whispering well below the labouring engine, she told François who this stranger was and that Albert had said her father was not at Gurs. “Renée won’t mind the money going on him,” she said, hoping that this was true.
At Pontacq, the innkeeper’s wife, no longer smiling, had to be paid a good deal to let them stay for an afternoon while they washed Albert and his clothes. They got rid of the beard and most of the lice. Solid food made him retch, but the chicken bones delivered up a thin soup, which he managed to keep down.
Albert saw his deliverance as miraculous, said over and over again that it was the red case she was carrying that had caught his eye. “Your father”—his hands wavering in the air conveyed something big and wholly indescribable—“he’s a brave man. Remarkably brave.”
There were a great number of things that Ilse wanted to ask, but these words with their horrible implications silenced her. Inside the house, a murmuring discussion went on. The night was clear. She and Albert sat on a rough bench outside the backyard behind the house, where the last scrawny hens were pecking. When she leant her head back against the wall, she could see stars. In Marseilles, even in the middle of the night there was life somewhere. Here, there was not even the sound of a distant car. Here, if a dog barked, the neighbours would know about it.
The Children's War Page 26