Tightrope

by Simon Mawer

  For a while she sleeps, her head rocking from side to side with the motion of the vehicle, at one point resting on the shoulder of one of the men beside her. She wakes with a start and snatches herself upright.

  He smiles. She looks away, past the other man, out of the window. Paris is coming upon them by stealth: houses, villages merging into suburbs, warehouses becoming factories, railway lines converging into shunting yards; and then familiar buildings standing shoulder to shoulder along the boulevards, tall blocks with mansard roofs. There is a glimpse of water as they cross the river, a glimpse of the Bois on one side, and suddenly through the windscreen, down converging parallels of trees, a view of the Arc. She knows where they are, the exact address to which they are going: 84 Avenue Foch. Paris Headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst, the SD, the intelligence agency of the SS. She knows the addresses and the organisations – the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Abwehr – their uniforms, their ranks, their characteristics. Hours of lectures at Beaulieu have given her this, the intricate theology of enemy intelligence.

  ‘My parents. Do they know I’m coming?’

  The road passed through woods and breasted an escarpment, winding downwards to the plain below. She’d forgotten the smallness of England, its vulnerability. A small country of which she knew almost nothing.

  ‘I telephoned them as soon as we had news of your arrival. I’d already written, when we first heard you were safe.’

  ‘So they’ll be expecting me.’

  ‘Of course they’ll be expecting you.’

  ‘And my brother?’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll have told your brother.’

  She thought for a while. ‘It’s going to be more difficult with family,’ she said. ‘With people who know me.’

  ‘You’ll find your feet soon enough.’

  Find your feet. The feet were the most important part of the body, much more important than your brain. Women had scratched each other’s eyes out over a pair of boots. In the evenings they unwrapped their feet and washed them with what little water there might be. Washed each other’s feet, often. Tenderly. With love. Like Christ. Your feet were your life. With your brain you could only think, but if you had your feet you could work and if you could work you might survive.

  The journey went on. There were houses now, the outskirts of Oxford, the road dropping down Headington Hill to the river. There was Magdalen Tower from where she had heard the choristers sing on May Morning in the second year of the war, a piece of England that she had barely understood at the time and understood even less now, a place of picture postcards, not a home. Bicyclists besieged them in the High Street and the Cornmarket. St Giles spread open as wide as a Paris boulevard; and then they were on the Banbury Road and turning into the street that she had last seen in the early autumn of 1943, thinking that she might be away a few months, that she was going on the greatest adventure imaginable, that she would live or die. Instead she had achieved something different: neither death nor life but an existence between the two states, a kind of limbo.

  The car slowed, turned into a gravel drive and came to a halt. Marian peered up at red brick and steeply pitched roofs, at a hint of turret, a suggestion of gargoyle, the intimation of an ogee window. She tried to evoke a sense of familiarity from the stew of her memory but the place remained strange to her – her family had only lived here for eighteen months and it had never become home, not in the way the house in Geneva had been home, not imbued with memory so that somehow you were moulded to it and it to you.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Atkins, as if to remind her.

  ‘Of course.’

  The driver came round and helped her out. She stepped onto the gravel just as the front door opened like some device in a stage set, to disclose her parents, or some simulacrum of her parents artificially aged as though for a theatrical performance, her father quite grey and stooped, her mother small and stout where once, Marian supposed with a sudden rush of understanding, she had been petite and voluptuous.

  There was an awkward moment of greeting, the pair shuffling round her, neither knowing which one should embrace their daughter first. And she didn’t know how to respond, how to conduct herself, how to navigate the treacherous waters of familial discourse. Two years had been enough to kill any instinct she may have possessed. ‘Papa,’ she said. ‘Maman.’

  They fussed around her and made small exclamations of surprise and simulated delight and barely disguised shock – ‘You’re so thin. Frank, elle est tellement maigre!’ – and kissed her as though she were made of something fragile and frangible whereas she was, Marian knew, as tough as rope.

  ‘This is Miss Atkins,’ she said, pulling away.

  Atkins smiled. The smile never spread to her eyes. It was a social convention, like shaking hands. ‘I’m glad I can deliver her back to you,’ she told them. ‘She’s been very courageous. We’re very proud of her. And now I have to get back to London, so I’ll leave her in your care for the moment.’ She might have been speaking of an invalid.

  Paris, November 1943

  There are five floors to 84 Avenue Foch. With a man on either side to hold her arms she climbs the stairs, crosses expansive landings, passes reception rooms and drawing rooms, climbs smaller stairs to the narrower purlieus of the fifth floor where a central corridor runs beneath the mansard roof. Doors on either side give onto small rooms where servants once lived, the maids and the valets.

  At the desk she is booked in as though it’s a pension and she is staying the night.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Follette, Laurence.’

  ‘Documents?’

  ‘They’re in my handbag.’

  Her escort places her handbag on the desk like evidence. They tip the contents out and make a meticulous list of all that is there, a pathetic heap of possessions that suddenly mean nothing at all. With two careful fingers, as if it might be contaminated, the man at the desk opens the identity card. Her photograph looks up at him, her right cheek just kissed by the edge of the Préfecture de Police stamp. Carefully he copies the details. Nom … Prénoms … Profession … Né le … à … all the little lies scrupulously copied into his register.

  ‘Your coat.’

  She surrenders her overcoat. Someone goes through the pockets and comes up with a brown capsule of rubber, her L capsule, her lethal pill, the route to nirvana, which would have denied them everything. ‘Why the hell didn’t you search her properly?’ the man at the desk demands of her escort, displaying the evidence in the palm of his hand. ‘She could have swallowed it and we’d have a fucking corpse on our hands.’

  Her escort make their excuses. The bitch was manacled. They had her held on both sides. She couldn’t have done anything. And all the while the bitch stares straight ahead, as though she doesn’t understand what they are saying. Better keep her German to herself. Better keep everything to herself that she can. Soon she will have nothing she can call her own except what is inside her head, and they’ll try and take that from her just as surely as they are taking everything else, the litter of things in the handbag, the tube of lipstick, the nail file, the handkerchief, the powder compact of nine carat gold that Vera gave her at that moment in the barn at Tempsford when they said goodbye and wished her merde alors!

  Merde indeed. Deep in it.

  When the reception is complete they push her into an empty room halfway down the corridor and slam the door shut. There’s a bed and bedside table, a chair and a washbasin. The window looks out over rooftops and down into an inner courtyard. She can raise the pane a few centimetres before it blocks. Cool air comes in through the gap – a fragile contact with the outside world. Beyond the glass is a wire grille.

  She sits on the bed and waits, thinking of a whole rush of things. How did they know to wait for her at the station? Had someone betrayed her or was it just a fluke, one of those things you cannot predict, cannot guard against? Thoughts and emotions merge, the one generating the other, fear awaking ideas of pain, anger evoking
questions that have no answer: how did they know? how could they have known? Then: what about her cover story? Is there any point in that? Laurence Follette. That is what they have written into the register but it is not what the Alsatian woman called out as she dozed on the bench, waiting for the Toulouse train. Marian? she called out. Marian Sutro? Only Yvette knew that. But Yvette didn’t know she’d be at the station of Vierzon. So why were they there? How much do they know? What do they know? Logical questions that will soon be lost in a world that has no logic.

  She sits on the bed and waits. No one knows she is here. She is detached from her circuit, on her own and adrift in this murderous sea. No one knows and no one will ever know. The extraneous noises – people coming and going, doors opening and closing, the occasional snatch of conversation, the distant and irritant sound of a gramophone – all conspire to heighten her feeling of isolation. Outside there is a world going on. Inside there is nothing but these walls, this bed with a plain bedside table and a single chair.

  In the early evening they bring food: a bowl of soup and a plate of lamb cutlets, carrots and boiled potatoes. She hasn’t eaten so well since coming to Paris but what this excellent food signifies is unclear. No one talks to her. No words beyond the necessary minimum are uttered. ‘What am I doing here?’ she asks, but the man who attends to her offers no answer. When she demands to go to the lavatory he takes her to the end of the corridor and stands with the door open, watching.

  ‘I need some privacy.’ She says it in French but he just stares at her as if he hasn’t understood a word. ‘Privat?’ she tries, choosing her German carefully so as not to betray her true knowledge of the language. ‘Geschlossen?’

  The man glances over his shoulder to see if he is being watched, then pulls the door closed. It’s a small victory, the first time she has managed to bend one of them to her will. But what has it gained her? A cubicle smelling of disinfectant with no lock on the inside and a barred window. She squats on the bare porcelain and feels the world close in on her, a universe as narrow as a rat trap. Within a minute the guard is hammering on the door and shouting, ‘Dépêchez-vous!’ and pushing the door open just as she is pulling up her knickers. ‘Komm!’ He grabs her arm and marches her back to her cell.

  The first night is spent in a limbo of expectancy. She lies down on the bed in her petticoat and pulls the single blanket over her and imagination does its work, conjuring devils out of the dark. Sleep comes in snatches so her fantasies are magnified by repetition, each awakening being signalled by a renewed fear. When she sleeps she dreams, and the dreams are uniform in giving her hope that is dashed by each waking: she dreams of home, of safety and security, and she awakes always to this small space, this bare room in the attic of a town house in Paris, this anteroom to a universe she cannot yet comprehend.

  Home

  They stood in the porch and watched the Humber ease its way out of the drive. Marian’s mother held one of her hands and rubbed it as though it were cold. ‘So thin,’ she repeated.

  ‘Don’t fuss, Maman.’

  ‘They treat prisoners of war like this?’

  ‘I wasn’t a prisoner of war, Maman.’

  ‘What were you, then? A prisoner. It was war. Weren’t you some kind of soldier? Weren’t you?’

  Her father muttered something about the Geneva Conventions, as though he were still there at the League of Nations, mouthing words of peace and rationality while the whole civilised world collapsed around him. She turned away from the discussion and made her way inside.

  The smell of the house was familiar. She had so long been anaesthetised to smell, desensitised to corruption and decay. Shit had meant nothing to her; a swimming soup of diarrhoea alive with worms, nothing; the stink of blood and vomit, the pungent stench of decaying flesh, crawling with dying lice, nothing – and yet she could smell this scent, which was the scent of her own being and the people she had come from. Family. She felt the smell envelope her.

  ‘I’ll make a pot of tea,’ her mother was saying. ‘You take her through to the sitting room, Frank. See that she’s comfortable.’

  ‘I think I’d like a bath first. And a change of clothes.’

  ‘Of course.’ Her mother looked her up and down. ‘Put some proper clothes on, not those dreadful things. I’ll bring the tea up. Go with her, Frank. See she’s all right.’

  ‘I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself, Maman. Please don’t fuss. And there’s no need to bring anything up.’

  ‘Go easy on the hot water, Squirrel,’ her father called after as she climbed the stairs. ‘Usual shortages, I’m afraid. Meant to be no more than five inches, although no one will be watching.’

  Her bedroom was a sanctuary, full of things forgotten and things dreamed of but never longed for. Early in her captivity she learned that – never long for what you will never have. Your treasure became a scrap of cloth, a hair pin, a splinter of wood, your spoon; never things like these, carefully folded into drawers, laundered and perfumed with lavender, or hung like flayed skins in the quiet shadows of a wardrobe. Her mother had kept everything like a shrine to a dead daughter. But the dead had been resurrected after a fashion and now she looked at her things in wonder, took them out and held them against her to see how she looked in the long mirror. That was a shock. She had not seen her image, not the whole length of her, in almost two years. Curious, she pulled her beret off. Her hair was growing back. You might call the cut gamine, if the word or the style meant anything in England. Weeks ago she had just looked bald.

  She put the dresses aside and took off her clothes. The naked creature in the looking glass was a caricature of the woman who left this room two years earlier, an anatomical model showing the joints and bones and sinew but little of the substance. ‘You’re not as bad as many I’ve seen,’ the Red Cross doctor had told her. Inured to being naked before strangers, she had stood before him without shame while he listened to her breathing, tapped her back and front, placed a stethoscope on her chest to hear her heart, and on her belly to hear the movement of her bowels, then put her on the scales to weigh her. They’d given her some pills and calcium tablets, ointment for the sores on her legs. ‘Just eat sensibly. Not too much meat, not too much of anything. Lots of starch and fresh vegetables and fruit if you can get them. You’ll be right as rain in a few weeks.’

  She wrapped herself in her dressing gown and padded quietly to the bathroom where she drew a bath much deeper than five inches, and washed, slowly and methodically, as though she might rid herself of the stink of the camps. But the smell remained there inside her, a fetid, sour reminder of what had been.

  As she was drying, her mother knocked on the door. ‘Are you all right, darling? Can I come in?’

  There was a moment of panic. ‘No, Maman, you cannot. Please don’t fuss. I’ll be down in a sec.’

  She waited for her mother’s footsteps on the stairs before opening the door. Back in her room she searched for underwear that would fit. The flannel underpants provided by the Red Cross were a novelty, a luxury, the first proper underwear she had worn in months; but the things she found in her chest of drawers were different, an almost forgotten species of clothing – cotton drawers she must have worn at school, but also pink and blue silk knickers with lace edges and Parisian labels, and brassieres designed to contain full breasts, not the shrunken paps that she possessed now. She tried on whatever fitted her and stuffed the brassiere cups with handkerchiefs, then found a floral frock with padded shoulders that gave her a bit of bulk and a fullness in the upper arms that suggested flesh where there was none. In the long mirror she looked thin, but no longer skeletal. The light jersey seemed to float around her, barely touching her flesh. Dressed properly for the first time in over a year, she felt naked.

  She crept downstairs. In the drawing room she discovered her parents sitting among the teacups and the questions. What did they do to you? What was the camp like? How did you manage? How did you survive? Questions that had no answers. ‘I really
don’t want to talk about it,’ she told them. ‘I just want to get on with things. They’ll want me in London—’

  ‘In London?’

  ‘I’ll have to write a report. And …’ She cast around vaguely, unsure what would be required of her.

  ‘There’ll be trials,’ her father said. He had been on the telephone, calling on former colleagues. ‘War crimes. They cannot be allowed to get away with what they’ve done. And they’ll need witnesses.’

  ‘Witnesses? I don’t want to be a witness. I want to get on, not look back.’ She handed her ration books to her mother. ‘You’ll need these, won’t you, Maman? I’ve forgotten how everything works. Do you still have to register with each shop? Anyway, Vera thought of everything, as you can see. She’s like that. Now tell me all your news. Tell me about Ned. How is he? Does he know I’m back?’

  Her mother made that little moue of disapproval that she always showed when her son was mentioned. ‘He’s still the same. Barely lets us know what’s going on. But your father wrote to him when we heard about you. He sent a postcard in return.’ She handed it to her daughter like a barrister showing evidence to a witness.

  Marian looked at her brother’s familiar scrawl. Whatever he wrote was barely legible, as though words were a mystery to him. Good. Tell her to get in touch when she’s back. That was all. ‘Typical Ned.’ It was a relief to laugh, a comfort to be back within the small, pointless difficulties of family life. ‘And Uncle Jacques and all the family. Have you heard from them? Are they all right?’