‘Von Choltitz didn’t want to do it, but he couldn’t delay obeying for very much longer. The orders from Hitler were coming thick and fast. He related the situation to the brother of the Swedish consul, Rolf Nordling, who was from a neutral country, and asked him if he knew anyone in the Resistance who could be used to talk to the American army on his behalf. Rolf Nordling answered immediately: “Yes, there’s Alexandre de Saint Phalle, an old friend of mine.” We were friends long before the war and were often in secret contact during the Occupation.’
Of course Poum hadn’t been there with him then, but she was in Paris at that time. She had hidden Jewish friends, been hungry and seen her father die. She had breathed that air of war, the war that brought them together. Her castaway expression has vanished; her listening face, more present than usual, sees each word as it steps exactly in past footsteps.
‘So I was brought by Rolf Nordling to the German Kommandantur and given a free pass to leave Paris and drive towards the Americans. In fear of endangering the population, General Bradley was holding his troops back. In one pocket, I had von Choltitz’s free pass to get through the German checkpoint, and in the other, I had von Choltitz’s letter to Bradley, asking him to move in as fast as possible so he could hand over his surrender. This was high treason for the Germans.’
‘Before Hitler could burn Paris?’
‘Exactly, Catherine.’
I want to know what happens next. But, strangely, it’s not exciting. My father speaks in a precise, dull, deadpan voice. A voice that says the minimum it can, a voice without its usual enthusiasms and flourishes, a frowning voice weighed down with too many lives, too many other people’s memories. Yet it never loses its momentum – driving off now towards the German checkpoint.
‘So, I left with three other men, Poch Pastor, Arnould and Laurent. I don’t know what Laurent was doing there, he jumped in at the last moment, insisting on coming.’ He shrugs his shoulders. ‘There was something wrong about him. I was worried he’d jinx the whole operation.’
‘Why did you let him come?’
He shrugs again and I see that hidden gentleness in his strength, something that lets go, that slips and shrugs – something that is not grown-up at all. Then he sips his wine without looking sadly at his empty plate or casting a roving eye at ours.
‘We were given a car. Twenty minutes later, we were at the German checkpoint. A German soldier walked up to the car window and saluted. I got out and handed over von Choltitz’s free pass. He stood looking at it and motioned me to follow him into the outbuilding. There he disappeared behind a door and I sat in that room with von Choltitz’s other letter to Bradley crinkling in my back pocket.’
He smiles blindingly at us.
‘I never sweated as much in my whole life. If they had searched me, we were all dead. I recited the popes, I recited the Roman emperors, I recited the American presidents to myself and he still didn’t come back. When he finally returned, he walked me to the car without a word. I slowly got behind the wheel again and he handed me back my free pass. Then, taking a map from his pocket, he said, ‘Landminen!’ and guided us through a tortuous route to avoid the landmines on the road for about half a kilometre. Returning to the car window, he bent towards me and, pointing his arm straight ahead, said: ‘Amerikaner, zehn Kilometer.’ And we drove off.’
He smiles at me.
‘Suddenly, there I was, cruising in the French countryside. The sun was shining, there was a peasant ploughing his field with a horse-drawn plough, unconscious of the fact he was between the two most powerful armies in the world.’
I can hear the German voice in my ear, see the German soldier standing on the road in the glaring sunshine, smell the countryside. I don’t notice someone has stopped at our table. When I do, for a moment, I think they are Germans. Before I can ask what happened with General Bradley, my father has thrown his arms in the air: ‘Niki!’
A woman surrounded by a phalanx of people stops in front of my father. From within her tight little group, she has a withdrawn, secure smile, as if by holding it back from the throng makes her shine all the more. My father hugs her. Is this the same Niki? Poum has become marmoreal, so it must be. We both stare at Alexandre. His face, as clear as the French countryside on a sunny day in 1945, has forgotten everything about the sculpture of the banker clutching his gold.
Even Niki seems slightly bemused as she’s swallowed into my father’s warm, forgetful embrace. He presents her to my mother, who nods. He turns to me: ‘And have you met my youngest daughter? Do you want your cousin Niki to make a sculpture of you, Catherine?’
I slump in my chair, slip and land on the floor under the table. My mother chuckles helplessly. Soon Niki is gone and her departure becomes a strange anticlimax.
Poum sighs.
‘My sweetheart, why were you so welcoming to her?’
Suddenly Alexandre’s eyes focus and he shakes his head.
‘I forgot. All I saw was my brother André’s daughter.’
24
PRISONERS
We are walking into the lobby of a hotel in Bruges. The thick carpet drinks our steps. My father carries a supermarket bag, because again he has on the spur of the moment decided to drive me to Belgium. If a policeman, a teacher or an old aunt stopped us, I could recite the list of its contents like an American GI: a new nightdress, a new pair of pyjamas, new shaving gear and two new toothbrushes.
Smiling sunnily, unaware of the looks cast on our skimpy baggage, Alexandre sails up to the reception desk and asks: ‘May I have a room for my little girl and me?’
The man looks a little flustered.
‘A room, Sir?’
‘Yes,’ he beams, ‘we are sick of being in a car. Aren’t we, Catherine?’
The man looks down into his big book as if it had suddenly become a pond.
I feel vaguely sorry for him. He should be far away from here, playing cricket in England on a sunny village green or being a teacher in Canada. The earnestness of his Adam’s apple, his waif-like frown, his too pale skin, beg for open air, wide spaces. The job of hotel clerk in Bruges, Belgium, has deadened him. Despite his Belgian accent, unlike the people in the street who seem quite happy, he’s not part of this place. I always pick out the person who doesn’t fit. Maybe because Alexandre fits so well, everywhere, as if every event, every street corner, every room, every encounter were tailor-made for him and his mood of the moment.
All the while, my father is looking around as if he had built the place with his own hands. But that would be quite impossible; his hands move too fast. They have no time to weigh, to hold. They act on the run, burglars in their own drawers and pockets. After several unproductive minutes, the man produces a key with a bold silver number.
Alexandre bounds into the lift with me in tow, pursued by another hotel clerk, who squeezes in with us. He offers to carry the plastic bag and my father hands it over to him happily. The man opens a door for us and puts the key on a little table, as if he were giving it to the room rather than to us. My father thanks him and gives him a tip. We cross the tiny frontier of the threshold. Then the door closes and we are alone. My father sits on the end of the bed.
‘You don’t mind sleeping with your old father?’
Sylvia left several months ago without a word of explanation. Even if the place looks exactly the same, I miss her terribly. Our private English world right in the middle of my parents’ apartment has vanished. Nothing could be better in my book than not sleeping in a room alone as I have done since she has gone.
‘Look outside, Catherine.’
I move to the window and am surprised how high we are. No wonder the lift took so long to get to our floor. The hotel is modern, tall and narrow. You look down, down, into a grey courtyard with mottled brown walls. Men are walking round and round it, one behind the other.
‘Who are they?’
‘Gangsters, criminals, robbers … It’s a prison, Catherine.’
He’s standing behin
d me. In that moment of quivering dusk, we both look down at the walking men as they circle round and round outside of time – strangely absent, strangely free. We stand there maybe ten minutes, without moving, until a guard whistles and they file back into the grey building. We wait until all those human lives are locked up and still we remain, staring down at the empty courtyard. My father sighs. I hear in his sigh the breath of all the caged men, all the clanging of doors, all the loneliness of the night.
He jumps to his feet, opting out of the mood he has created. I take longer to snap out of it.
‘Aren’t you terribly hungry?’
He always assumes everyone is as hungry as he is. He grabs his coat and rushes out. I run after him, catching my own coat and his scarf on the way. Soon we are in the lift, borne down to the lobby. The hotel clerk clears his throat as if he were going to make a speech, but my father is already shrugging into his coat halfway down the road.
Night is squeezing the winter streets now and the lights of shops and restaurants feel unreal, like walking into a Christmas tree. I am surprised to sit on a real chair and lean on a real table when he finds a place to have dinner. Soon he has a mountain of chips between us and compliments the waiter as if he had sculpted them one by one.
‘Shall we go and see a film of Louis de Funès?’
He smiles wickedly.
‘We’re in a city of museums and we’re going to a comedy. You mustn’t tell your mother. She would be horrified.’
After the film, we walk in the icy, dark streets. We go into a newsagent and buy some newspapers for him and funnies for me. My father says funnies instead of comic books, pocketbook instead of wallet, gramophone instead of record player, silencer instead of exhaust pipe …
When we return to the hotel, some Americans are at the reception desk. The hotel clerk is looking on helplessly. My father swims in, helping him with the translating, vaunting Flemish paintings, Belgian hotels, canals and chips. Then, with a wave, he’s gone. Back in the lift, he chuckles happily: ‘Ah, Americans! They’re so positive!’
‘Like you,’ I say staunchly.
He stares at me in surprise.
‘Do you think so, Catherine?’
He has no time to notice himself, no time at all. Like Poseidon, he ‘happens’. Like Winnie-the-Pooh, he loves honey; like Alexander the Great, he has lost his best friend; like the English, he believes in the Magna Carta.
He smiles at me.
‘Do you know that the Magna Carta existed long before the Declaration of Independence, long before Les droits de l’homme?’
I nod. Of course, I have always known without being told that the English invented freedom before everybody else. I still feel wholly English, even if Sylvia isn’t there to tell me anymore. To be English is to remember her, to be English is not to be French, to be English is to be one’s own self, away from aunts and cousins. To be English is to be safe.
‘Do you know why, my little one, you were born in England?’
I shake my head carefully. I have never questioned why – it’s as much part of me as my lungs or my hand inside his. I don’t really want to know; it makes the ground slippery, suddenly, under my Startrite shoes.
‘You were born in London because of the Magna Carta!’
I smile in relief. Now that sounds quite all right.
‘The Magna Carta is the earliest treatise on freedom in the Western world. That is why you are your own person in England. A man can walk into a town hall and say “this is my daughter” and they believe you, just as long as the woman involved says the same thing. In France, they have the Napoleonic Code and even though I love his genius, Napoleon was not a democrat – and democracy, since Athens, is the highest form of virtue, the apex of human civilisation, Catherine.’
‘What about the Carthaginians?’
He frowns slightly, as if he were on the verge of asking me why I always needed to bring them in. I don’t feel our divide straightaway, but little by little it appears we are starting not to see eye to eye on the Carthaginians.
‘The Carthaginians were an oligarchic republic, but yes, they were partially democratic. They even had trade unions and elected legislators.’
I am relieved they were democratic. Of course they were … If you can’t be Athenian or Carthaginian, you might as well be American – if you can’t be English, of course. It never occurs to me that neither my father nor my mother are English, nor that I am the only one to be so. The fact that Sylvia is English is enough for me. I wonder if he misses America as much as I miss England. When I ask, he sighs.
‘I don’t know, Catherine. I am French, you know. When the war was on, there was no choice for me. I had to come back. It was visceral.’
So that’s why he left Marguerite … Naturally, he always speaks English with me, but when he speaks English with the English or with Americans, he’s different – younger somehow, as if something had peeled off him. Very soon, we are both in bed – he in his new pyjamas, lying on his side like a beached whale, I in my new nightdress. His happy snores stand guard around me. My nightmares are left to roam the hotel corridors. Without sparing a thought for the prisoners so close to us, before I can count three snores, I’m fast asleep.
Next day, we’re walking along the canals. He’s nearly as obsessed by The Odyssey as my mother.
‘After so many years,’ he explains, ‘people doubted Odysseus was Telemachus’s father. But his son would invariably answer: “My mother has always told me I was Odysseus’s son – and I believe her.” Listen, if anyone says the slightest thing to you at school or anywhere, all you have to do is answer the same thing as Telemachus. Do you understand?’
I nod vigorously. He walks on with a relieved step. I realise I haven’t understood anything at all.
‘But why would anyone ask me that?’
‘You never know. People are stupid sometimes.’
‘Do you mean that is why you are not there on Sundays or on Christmas Day?’
He looks at me sharply again. Then his eyes return to rest on the water. I notice that he likes to look at nature when he tells a story – water, trees, horizons, oceans, clouds.
‘You could say that. But I have to go, you understand.’
I nod. I never question what seems inevitable. I know all about the islands of Nausicaa and the witch Circe. Odysseus had to deal with them on his way home to Ithaca. The girls at school have no idea about Circe and Nausicaa. You just wonder how they get on.
The cobbled streets are fun. We walk and walk, hand in hand. The canals shimmer all around us as we pace their watery labyrinths. Soon we encounter a lace factory, full of old ladies and nuns making lace. My father buys two handkerchiefs – one for me and one for my sister.
‘My sister!’
He nods seriously as if I was half supposed to know, as if it were obvious.
‘Yes, she is your very eldest sister.’
I am so excited I can’t breathe. A sister … The business of buying the two lace handkerchiefs is not given as short shrift as usual. I can hardly wait for my father to settle his purchase with the wizened nun. He’s always slower with women, any woman, even if they are so old they could be dead. He seems to have more patience, more gentleness in store for the women they were, for the femininity still under their veils. The eyes, nearly lost in folds of skin, twinkle back and bless him and call him their son. At last we are out of the cave-like stone house carrying our slight burden.
‘What is she like?’
‘Who?’
‘My sister …’
His gaze travels over the water.
‘She can draw marvellously. She’s very gentle, but very brave. When she was young she was very beautiful. Now she has many children and an unfaithful husband who cheats on her as much as he can. So she has become very religious instead.’
‘Isn’t she happy?’
He shakes his head.
‘No. She has taken on religion like one takes on a lover.’
This se
ems rather esoteric, but some part of me understands.
‘You mean she’s not her own person?’
He frowns a smile that holds the moment in balance, but doesn’t say anything.
‘Maybe she could read the Magna Carta?’
His frown goes away and his smile climbs all over his face.
‘Maybe, Catherine, maybe.’
He pats my back.
‘My little one, you must never lose yourself.’
‘Odysseus didn’t in the end. He got back to Ithaca, didn’t he?’
He smiles.
‘Yes, even when he listened to the sirens, he made sure to be tied to the mast of his ship while his soldiers rowed on with their ears stuffed with beeswax.’
We cling to each other’s hands and walk through the icy air without feeling the cold.
‘Once, your sister was alone in the country when suddenly, in the middle of the night, she heard a noise. She lit her bedside lamp and saw a big black man carrying a lot of her things under his arm. He was a burglar.’
‘What did she do?’
‘She said to him: “Do you know that what you are doing is very wrong?” And they started having a theological conversation, she sitting in bed in her nightgown and he standing on her bedroom carpet. Her husband was away.’
He looks at the clouds.
‘She’s my eldest child.’ He corrects himself: ‘My eldest today.’
When he looks at me, his eyes are as pale and grey as the canals we are following. Suddenly he sees a church.
‘Let’s go in. Look, there is a Mass.’
Anything with him is fun and unexpected, even Mass. We listen to the priest in the freezing building, but as usual I am not cold with my hand in his pocket. We both go to communion and have to put money in a bowl near the priest. Then another robed man comes round for more and, when we leave, he is at the door with a copper dish.
As soon as we are out of hearing, my father laughs: ‘That was a prosperous-minded church!’
Poum and Alexandre Page 17