The Children's War

by Monique Charlesworth

  “She had a nursemaid’s job in Hamburg,” he said. “She found it through friends of mine, good people, the Riemke family. I am sure your mother was happy there.”

  “I remember,” she said. “I was in Meknès, with you, when she went to get the job.”

  Ilse thought of the big house her mother had described in that one brief letter, set in an avenue lined with trees and with the wonderful view of the river; it should have been safe, but had not been. There had been children in that house, but she would never know anything about them. The white flash of jealousy she felt was instantly subsumed as the hot wind carried them all away.

  Ilse tilted back her head and stared without blinking at the way the light filtered through the green of the palms and blurred the edges of the leaves until they were shining silver. In a little while the palm trees steadied themselves. Whatever she had expected and hoped, it was not this.

  “Mutti had a plan,” Ilse said. Her voice was very flat and very far away. “I mean, she was planning for me to go back to Germany. With proper papers. I chose not to. Vati thought it was too dangerous.”

  “He was right. It was,” said Willy.

  “She was so certain that they would win.”

  She was gulping a little, swallowing air.

  “So were most people. Ilse, people can decide things meaning well, from the best of reasons and sometimes they are wrong. When I sent her to Hamburg, I thought it was safer in a big city and easier to find work. It wasn’t safe. And I let Toni send you back to France. That was wrong, too.”

  “Why did you let it happen? Was it because of money?”

  Her flat voice went on asking things the old Ilse would never have asked.

  Willy sighed and lit another cigarette. “Not money, no. I don’t know. I knew that I had to rejoin the Legion. I had to fight the Nazis, or at least try. And then you would be on your own with Toni. Because I couldn’t ever make Toni do anything she didn’t want to do. And I suppose I didn’t want to give her an excuse.”

  “An excuse for what?”

  He looked down at his hands. “For leaving me. She was so necessary to me, but she went her own way. I didn’t think that she would look after you properly, she was so sure she could not—you know Toni and her certainties. She seemed so certain that you should be with your parents. My darling girl, there is much to blame me for.”

  Ilse thought that she did blame him, but it was all too long ago. For a time, neither of them found anything to say.

  “Did she leave you?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. I know she’s not in Meknès now. I heard that she’s in Casablanca.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He brushed that aside. “Your mother wrote a letter which travelled half round Africa before it reached me in Eritrea. In 1941, but written earlier. She was frantic, that you were missing in France. She blamed herself, she wanted me to try and find you. I couldn’t leave the Legion— I wrote and told her that.”

  “So she knew that she had made a mistake,” said Ilse very calmly, glimpsing the dark abyss of her mother’s despair and pushing it away from her at once.

  “Where is Otto?”

  “Vati got caught. He was deported back to Germany. Nearly two and a half years ago. What do you think happens to the people in those camps?” Willy was looking at his glass. “Willy, could he still be alive?”

  Then his eyes dropped. He could not meet her eyes because it was too much to bear. With a jolt, she understood that her father was dead and Willy knew it. A cold tremor ran from her head right to the soles of her feet.

  “Tell me,” she said in a tight voice.

  “I don’t know. There were stories in the American newspapers about camps. We’ll see when we get into Germany. The world will see,” he said. “Every German battalion has a movie operator, did you know that? Wherever they go, they take miles and miles of film. On the Russian front, everywhere. No matter how bad it is. In Sicily, we caught a battalion and found the film and showed it. Everyone will be made to watch it, when it’s all over.”

  Willy had faith, still, in the goodness of people. Ilse took her hand back and lifted the glass. The prickling drink seemed to go straight to the ice-cold place where her heart was.

  “Where have you been? When did you arrive in France?”

  He had landed on August 16th at Cavalaire-sur-Mer, proud to be one of the first Legionnaires to touch the soil of France. His war, he said, had been fine. There had been action here and there, in Eritrea, in Italy at a place called Monte Cassino. She nodded. The main thing was that he was here and safe. The Legion was going after the retreating Nineteenth Army into Germany. First, they wanted to liberate Marseilles and in particular Fort Saint-Nicolas, where their recruits were traditionally tested and screened. It was a matter of honour. They would be moving on almost immediately. It was a precise conversation and every word was crisp and unreal. Delicately, he looked at her and then away again, as though the weight of his eyes was too much as, indeed, at times it was. When he took her hand he squeezed it and very gently she then let go.

  “You know,” she said, smiling as much as she could, “I’ve been here before. I came to the Carlton to deliver clothes. For the atelier. They always told me to go by the back door. This is the first time I’ve sat on the terrace.”

  He took a long pull at the cigarette and looked at her. “Perhaps you have a friend I could invite to dinner here? Several friends?” It had always been one of his gifts, knowing how to say the one thing that made everything all right.

  When they parted, Ilse walked until her feet hurt. It was good to substitute a real ache for the deep sorrow that she could not talk about, not to anyone. There had been many friends: Albert and François and Renée and Madame Dumont, who had probably died in Marseilles, because that was what happened to people when you loved them. She had Marie-France. She went home and harassed and cajoled her until she got out of bed.

  The three of them had dinner that night at the Carlton. Marie-France, famously late for everything, had to be urged at each stage of dressing to get ready at all. At the hotel, she ate and drank and danced and flirted herself into a semblance of happiness and then from that into something closer to the real thing. Ilse knew that her friend, who was making an enormous effort to appear normal, must seem very hard and uncaring to Willy. It was Ilse’s fault, because she had not found a way to tell her friend that her parents were dead. Marie-France believed that she had long been orphaned. She could not resurrect and kill them in one sentence. She turned and turned the words in her head, but it was hard to explain to anyone who had not known them what lives her parents had lived; yet more impossible to explain how they had died. Telling people things never did anybody any good. Willy smiled at her and Marie-France drank champagne and grew giggly and Ilse, with so many things in her head, smiled back and was silent and went on feeling as though it was all happening to somebody else.

  They only had two days and one of them was already over. Willy got hold of a jeep and petrol. Early the next morning they drove along the coast.

  “I want you to see the most beautiful town on the Riviera,” he said. “I always said to Toni, ‘If one of us dies, I shall go and live in Nice.’ ”

  They walked along the Promenade des Anglais and looked at the beach.

  “There is a decent Germany,” said Willy. “People like us.”

  “Life must go on,” she said in her new, calm voice. “Even in Germany.”

  He pressed her arm. “I mean it, little cynic. There is the Germany of good people, of Goethe’s Faust and of Bach and Beethoven. When this is over, that Germany will return.”

  Ilse knew that the Germany of Heinrich Hoffmann, of Struwwelpeter, would prevail. “Will you ever return?” He shook his head. “Me neither. I’m never going back,” she said. She had nobody to return to.

  “Of course not. You’re coming to Meknès,” he said. “You’re coming to me.”

  In the lobby of the Hotel Negresco the doo
rman saluted Willy, resplendent in his uniform. They walked along the red carpet to the restaurant and settled at a table with a brilliantly white cloth. Ilse sat in the sunlight shafting in from the huge window onto the Baie des Anges. While Willy read the menu and considered what delicacy they should sample, she saw herself entering the little white room with the small bed and the sun slanting across the floor. Turning, she found herself reflected in the mirror on the wardrobe door, grown large.

  “You’re too old for school. Time you found a decent job,” said the familiar voice. Toni swam into the image and stood, perfect as ever, red lips smiling but shaking her knowing head as their eyes met in mutual recognition of the impossibility of that return, of any return, for either of them.

  That evening, Willy went foraging. He carried boxes of K rations up the stairs to the Bonnards’ flat. These included white sugar and two huge boxes of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and tins of the Nescafé the Americans preferred to coffee beans. She found chewing gum and a powder to disinfect water and Mars bars, which were mostly chocolate, and dozens of tins of beef and ham. He had liberated four bottles of bourbon and four pairs of men’s army boots, really strong ones, which she could trade for something. When they said their farewells, she clung to him like a little girl. They would not lose each other now, he said, stroking her hair. The Legion would liberate Fort Saint-Nicolas in Marseilles and she should leave a message there, or in the barracks near the seafront in Nice, care of the treizième DBLE.

  Within weeks, the skies turned grey and the temperature dropped abruptly. It rained. The sudden bad weather jolted people to their senses. The public roistering finished. The Germans had burnt many stocks of food. The Allies were still at war and the Germans were resisting strongly in Holland and elsewhere. On the Eastern front, Warsaw had risen against the Germans, on the assumption that the huge Russian forces encamped outside the city would come to their aid. Warsaw was burning; the Poles could smell the smoke from fifteen kilometres away. The Russian army remained stationary. They waited as the Germans obliterated the freedom fighters and then, in reprisal, the city centre, reducing it to rubble, building by building, street by street. She prayed that François was not there. The French forces, Willy with them, were sweeping across France. In the middle of November they were involved in the battles for Belfort and Mulhouse, then the defence of Strasbourg. Next came Colmar. It looked as though Willy and the treizième DBLE would be among the first combatants to go into Germany. It was not to be expected that he would find time to write.

  France had no rolling stock to transport food. No petrol could be had and so many bridges had been blown that it was in any case impossible to drive anywhere. People were stuck where they were. Nobody could buy anything worth having. In the atelier, they had used up every scrap of fabric and now remade old clothes.

  Trailing home with a bag of onions she had snapped up in the market, Ilse found François standing in the street outside their flat. The shock was so great that she dropped the bag. He had gone to the mountains to see her. Père Lemusier had given him the address she had left there, of Marie-France in Cannes. He had a jittery look. Perhaps he would not even have gone as far as climbing the stairs up to the second floor, had she not happened to come home at that time.

  “I’m going away. I had to say goodbye,” he said.

  She took him past the parlour, where Maman sat and muttered to herself all day, through to the kitchen. While she chopped onions to fry with potatoes, François smoked and watched and made her clumsy. He said that he missed the Polish miners from the maquis. They were his friends. She understood from his manner of speaking that she was not a friend; she was probably a duty. The onion juice stung her hands and eyes. She peeled potatoes and kept her face turned away.

  “Are you going back to Poland?”

  “I tried, but there was no transport. I’m going into Germany with the Polish Brigade.”

  “What’s the news from Warsaw?”

  “They’re all gone. The Russians sat and watched the Germans massacre them. The Americans and the British left them to it. The Jews have all been liquidated and the patriots. The students, my friends, anyone who might have survived—they’re all dead.” These were the flat cadences of a person with no hope.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Onions,” she said, unable to help herself.

  “But what is it, my poor little siostrzyszka?”

  Any sympathy undid her. Gradually, she recovered herself.

  “I felt upset because of my parents,” she managed at last. “It’s because they’re both dead.” Then she stood awkwardly, red-nosed and hideous in front of a spitting frying pan, loathing herself for finding this excuse, this misuse of the truth, this double betrayal of self.

  Marie-France took her to one side. “Who is this fellow? One of those people from the maquis?” Evidently she did not like the look of him.

  “He has nowhere to stay in Cannes.” She shrugged.

  “I suppose he can sleep on Fernand’s bed, if you like.”

  Obviously it never entered her head that he might be the boyfriend. Ilse made up the pull-down bed in the sitting room. Exhausted, they went to bed early.

  In the early hours Ilse crept into the sitting room and sat and listened to his breathing. Behind the shutters and curtains the room was pitch-black. Her teeth chattered with cold, but she was afraid to go back, even for a blanket, in case she woke him. He was afraid of his dreams; she was afraid of everything. She turned the request over in her head. François, please take me with you. Why? What would she say then? In her head she prepared the impossible shameful words: she loved him. She wanted to be with him. Even in the dark, her face burnt at the idea of saying it. She prepared another statement: she wanted to be a Jew. Did she?

  He could not know that she had taken the Catholic faith. She had never told him, any more than she had told him that her mother was a Protestant. For him, she was a Jew, as her father was. She did not know whether a person could stop being one. The Nazis did not think so. Her head was burning, her feet like ice. In their different ways her parents had both been so difficult. If either of them had told her about their religion, then she could have been what they were. But neither had let her in. They had not needed faith, but she did. What they had in common was stubbornness. That was her inheritance. She would have to hold to what she was now.

  He was so quiet. She strained to hear. Perhaps he was awake and knew she was there. She opened her mouth but she could not force a word out. Surely, she thought, surely he knew.

  “Are you awake, siostrzyszka?” How soft his voice was. She must have dozed off on the sofa.

  “Mm,” she said.

  “It calms me, being with you.”

  “Good.”

  “Will you hold my head?”

  The moment had come. She moved towards him, knelt at the side of the pull-down bed and took his head in her hands, preparing to say the words.

  “When I was eleven I used to tease her,” he said. “By the time I was thirteen I knew she was dying. I used to run home from school, worried that she would not be there. She had red hair like yours. Such big eyes. A child doesn’t always know what is happening, but Polinka knew. I tried to make every minute matter. I used to draw funny pictures, to make her laugh. But by the end she was too tired and it was cruel, the exertion was too much for her. Everybody tiptoed around and she hated that. She wanted as much energy around as she could get. Told me to go down to the yard and stand on my hands and turn cartwheels, so she could watch. They lifted her to the window. That pale face, laughing.”

  “What was wrong with her?”

  “Tuberculosis and blood sickness. They sent her to the mountains, but nothing could be done.”

  His head was warm between her hands, his breathing relaxed. “Thank you, siostrzyszka.”

  The faint grey of day glimmered under the curtains. She happened to have red hair; that was all. He knew to drain all the m
agic out of their connection. A man did not want to marry his beloved sister. She went over it, over and over. Fiercely she told herself that, like Polinka, the child he had saved would live on in his head forever.

  She made him some of the Nescafé. She had almost got used to the taste. They sat opposite each other at the table and he drank the stuff with little grimaces.

  “What a Frenchman,” she said. “Only real coffee for you.”

  He was quiet; she had succeeded in calming him. The shape of him against the kitchen cupboard was something to remember always, the way he sat, upright, never lounging as he used to, because the hard back of the chair would hurt.

  After he had gone she walked through Cannes sightlessly. As soon as she heard that the road down into the north of Marseilles was open for civilian traffic, Ilse asked for a couple of days’ holiday. She told Marie-France that she needed to find out what had happened to Madame Dumont. This was correct but not accurate. Her true unhappiness lay in Marseilles and she wanted to immerse herself in it. Very early one morning, she took the first bus north out of Cannes. The coast roads were not yet open in places; the route circuitous. She stared out at the rain.

  The bus came in through La Capelette, a part of town Ilse hardly knew and so it took her a while to get her bearings and see that the Rue de Rome, packed with American trucks, actually ran parallel to the Boulevard Dugommier. She had brought several sachets of the curé’s herbs with her and she made a stew and flavoured it carefully and then soup, from the bones. Madame Dumont exclaimed several times what a good cook she was.

  While the old lady rested, she walked behind the few houses at the rim, which the Nazis had preserved, up across the rubble of the Vieux Port to the Maison Diamantée. The air, like the ground, was grey. She made her way across to where she thought the brothel might have been. She wanted to say prayers for her father and mother, and for Renée, but the ground was uneven and hurt her feet through the thin soles of her shoes and the wind whipped at her. Instead, she went back to the Maison Diamantée and leant against the walls for shelter, looking out over the harbour. It was full of boats. One after another the troopships and boats steamed in, packed full of provisions that went straight out again on the long line of trucks carrying everything away to the army.