Becoming Clementine: A Novel

by Jennifer Niven

  I had to know you somewhere,

  maybe long ago,

  on some forgotten highway….

  I knew a boy somewhere, maybe long ago. A boy, half-Choctaw, half-Creole, with a steel guitar and a Bluesman tattoo. He called me something once…what was it? Something different, something lovely…

  Or maybe on a pathway

  where I knew that I was lost….

  Down-home girl. He said that’s what I was because, whatever happened—no matter how many people I lost or how many things happened to me that were bad—I just kept on. He said I had no choice because that was the kind of person I was.

  I’ll love you forever

  and on the day when we die...

  They let me up just as I closed my eyes and gave in, drifting away with the song. I sat in a chair dripping water on myself and no one gave me a towel. Sergeant Bleicher walked in and stayed with me for three hours, and after that a round of guards came in and out, on shifts.

  In the morning, the Gestapo from the day before came to interrogate me. He brought in his breakfast and ate it in front of me while I sat and watched him. I was still wet, still shivering, but I watched him just like I was warm and dry and well fed. I watched him like I didn’t give two cents, like I didn’t mind that he was eating in front of me when I was hungry and tired. But even though I watched him, I was really far away in my own mind. I was hosting a dinner party for all the people in this world who I loved. I thought about each dish, each place setting, right down to the napkins—cloth ones from Deal’s General Store—and I was practically through dessert by the time the man finished.

  And then I put all those people I loved away, as if I were shutting them into a room that I’d already left. They would be safe there.

  Run away, Velva Jean. Lock yourself in that room and don’t come out.

  I turned my mind to Pierre, my dead husband, and the friends I still had in Paris, his friends, his family. I was too young to be a widow, and I didn’t care what happened to me, which made it easier to fight. I had nowhere to go in this world, and so it was just me, Clementine Roux. There was no room for anyone else.

  The German said, “I hope you’re feeling more cooperative this morning.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin and folded it beside the plate, so that I could still see and smell the eggs and potatoes and bacon that were left over.

  My stomach turned. But my head was clear. Clementine Roux was a down-home girl too. I said, “Not really.”

  At noon, I was driven back to Fresnes. Inside my cell, Annika sat under the window on top of the mattresses, the blanket covering them, but Millie was gone. When she saw me, Annika ran to the door and I thought again how much she belonged outside in the sun. She held her hand out to my lip and said something I couldn’t understand, and then she plucked the washcloth off the hook in the wall and wet it under the faucet. While she dabbed at my lip, careful not to hurt me, my eyes went past her to the desk chair. A woman sat there with thick glasses and gray-black hair and a face like a sheep. She watched us, and I said, “Millie?” I looked back and forth from Annika to this new woman.

  Annika said, “Gone.”

  When Annika was done cleaning my lip, the new woman stood and held out her hand and said, “Inés.” She was French.

  I shook her hand. “Clementine.”

  She said, “She is Russian?” She waved at Annika.

  “Yes.”

  I sat down on the mattress sofa and pulled the potato out of my sleeve. I held it up and Annika grinned and Inés took the potato from me and washed it under the faucet. I watched her hands, which were small but clever. She washed the potato as if it were made of gold, and I thought she might be a surgeon or a baker in real life, but I was too tired to ask her, too tired to get to know anyone else who would only go away soon.

  I handed Inés a bobby pin and showed her how it became a knife, and then she set the potato on the desk and sliced it into pieces. While we ate, I told them what had happened, in English and in French so that Annika might understand some, and afterward I explained the daily routine of Fresnes prison to Inés, just as Millie had done for me.

  We let Inés have the cot that night and as I lay on the floor I wondered when I would be taken away. I was too tired to chip at the vent, too tired to think of a way out. I wondered where I would go and who would be explaining me to the next person, and what they would say.

  I am Clementine Roux.

  There wasn’t much they could say because they didn’t know anything about me, and it would be just like I had never existed at all.

  Sometime in the night I woke up to the air raid siren. I lay on my mattress listening to the hum of engines, which sounded as if they were almost overhead. I got up from the floor and went to the window, and Annika joined me. We pressed our faces against the glass and we could see the German guards, running for the underground shelter that was outside the prison walls.

  Annika bumped my arm and pointed to the sky. A group of planes flew low over the prison—the B-17 Flying Fortress. I could almost feel the throttle in my hand, feel the rattle of the motor, see the lights of the controls spread out like stars. I wanted to say, “I flew one of those across the ocean,” but I didn’t say it because that was another girl from long ago and not Clementine Roux.

  As I watched, one of the planes seemed to tug a bit to the left, throwing the formation off. It wobbled and turned, and I could see that it was struggling to right itself.

  Suddenly the nose of the bomber pointed down and it went speeding toward the earth. I heard a second plane explode like a firecracker and a third, and we couldn’t see chutes or men jumping or where the other B-17s had gone. All we could see from the window were pieces of plane dropping from the sky, and a distant glow of fire.

  Annika rested her head on her hands, which were holding on to the windowsill. When she looked up again I could see she was crying, and I put my arm around her. We stood there, watching, waiting.

  The moon hung low in the sky. I thought: I know you’re out there, Émile. I know you’re trying to find me. Maybe you’re looking up at this same moon right now.

  Annika started to hum “Hymn to Avenger Field.” She said, “Sing, Clementine.”

  She started to sing it and I let her sing on her own for a while before I joined in. When we were finished a voice behind me said, “I know that song.”

  Inés was sitting up, rubbing her eyes. She reached for her glasses, which she tucked over one ear and then the other. She sang, “‘In the land of crimson sunsets, skies are wide and blue,’” in a warbly, off-key voice.

  I tried to make out her face in the dark. I said, “How would you know that?”

  “I worked on the Comet Line south of Nesles, and there was a girl pilot.”

  I said, “Comet Line?”

  “The Freedom Line. This girl was American and she was always singing that song. Not well. She didn’t have a voice like yours. But she was a nice girl. Smart. A lady.”

  “What happened to her?” I was afraid to ask it. Inés was here at Fresnes prison. She might have been caught and captured anytime, or Helen might have been with her.

  “I sent her with a guide and two other pilots—both male—to Spain.”

  “Do you know if she got there?”

  “I don’t know. Three days later I was arrested.”

  I suddenly didn’t want to talk anymore. I was thinking: Helen’s alive. She’s okay. She must have crashed too, but she’s fine. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t cry.

  Inés said, “You know her?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I used to.” From a very long time ago, back when I was a pilot too, back when I was a girl from North Carolina named Velva Jean Hart.

  THIRTY

  The next day was Sunday, August 20. Behind the prison walls, we could hear the sounds of planes over the city. Every time a prisoner was taken to headquarters, they brought news from the outside. We knew the BBC was warning the French to stay off the highways because Allied plan
es were bombing and strafing every moving object they could target. There had been a second Allied landing on the coast of southern France, and now the Allies were nearly to Paris, where police, subway workers, and postal workers were all on strike, and the Resistance was leading citizens to attack the Germans.

  Just after six o’clock the next morning, the coffee cart rattled down the halls, starting with the first floor, moving up to the second, then the third, until it reached our floor. One by one, I could hear the cell doors banging open. So many. Too many. It sounded like every single one of them was opening. The cart was making its way toward us. I heard a cell nearby open. Then another. Another.

  The cart stopped outside our door. I held my breath. Everything was quiet. Annika and Inés and I looked at each other, waiting. Go on, I thought. Keep going.

  The cell swung open and one of the matrons said, “Clementine Roux?”

  “Yes?”

  She said, “You are to leave here at noon today. Be ready.”

  “Where am I going?”

  She said, “I do not know where they’re sending you, but you should have your things together.” Unlike the other matrons, she had a pleasant face, fresh and scrubbed as a whitewashed fence.

  I sat up. “Something is happening out there. We can hear it.”

  She said, “The Allies have advanced within fifteen miles of Paris.”

  I said, “Then Liberation is almost here.” I felt a hopeful rise in my heart.

  She said, “Yes. For some,” and she walked out, shutting the door with a bang.

  The hours crawled by so that I lost all sense of time. At what must have been noon, the matron came back and waited while I said good-bye. I gave Inés a hug, even though I hardly knew her, and then I hugged Annika good and hard. I handed her one of my bobby pins and said, “We’ll see each other again,” and then in French, “See you soon. Take heart. Be strong.”

  Downstairs, I stood in line with a dozen other prisoners in that first room where we were searched the day we got to Fresnes. The prison guards gave me back my handbag, and I dropped the seashell, the wooden girl, and the hairpins into it, along with the green scarf I’d used as a turban. Ty’s compass was still hidden in my shoulder pad.

  There was a mirror hanging on the wall of the room, just by the door, and I looked up and caught my image there. At first, I thought it was someone else because the face was too pale, too thin, and the hair was too dark and short. The eyes looked blurry and the freckles had faded. The ones that were left stood out like chicken pox.

  They loaded us into the prison car and locked us in our chicken cages. I couldn’t tell where we were headed—if it was back into the city or somewhere farther out. Some of the women were crying, but I opened my bag and pulled out my lipstick, Révolution Rouge. Revolution Red. I painted my mouth a deep, blood red. I wasn’t going to cry, no matter where they were taking me. I decided Clementine Roux had cried enough, that she didn’t much like to cry to begin with, but with a dead husband she hadn’t had much choice. She’d done a lot of crying, but she wasn’t going to cry anymore.

  I recognized Romainville from the map I’d eaten. It sat on top of a low hill, fat and swollen, a thick stone fortress that looked exactly like Death’s Waiting Room should look. I stood in line in an office where there was a long counter, and behind this sat a half dozen German men in uniforms. I wondered if one of these men was Niklaus Reiner, Émile’s contact.

  When my name was called, I stepped up to the front, and a young officer sorted through my bag. He handed it back to me with everything still in it, but he held on to my identity paper.

  “You are American.” His English was clear and he didn’t have much of an accent.

  “Yes.”

  “I lived in the United States before the war, in New York City.” I thought: He’s trying to lull you in. He’s making friends with you so that you’ll tell him things.

  I said, “Why did you leave?”

  “The war. I had to return for mobilization, but as soon as the war is over I’m going back.”

  He handed me my driver’s license. He said, “Perhaps I’ll see you there.” His voice was kind and warm. I wondered if he was the one Émile had talked about. If he was, did he know it was me, the one they were sending? And if it wasn’t him, how was I supposed to know who I was looking for?

  I said, “Perhaps.” And then I held out my hand. “You know my name but I don’t know yours.” I thought, Please be Niklaus Reiner.

  The other officers stared as he shook my hand. He said, “I am Josef.”

  The barracks building was surrounded by a barbed wire fence at least ten feet tall, maybe taller than that. Guards stood at either end with searchlights and machine guns. My cell was on the ground floor and was shared with six other prisoners. There was a sign on the door that said “Alles Ist Verboten.” Everything Is Forbidden. The room was large, with a gravel floor, two-story wood bunks with rotting straw mattresses, and a wide window without bars. I could see right away that two of the girls were pregnant—one looked as if she were ready to have her baby any day now. An old woman, brittle as a dried leaf, stood beside a younger woman leaning on a crutch. Behind them, sitting on the floor, was a girl no older than sixteen and what looked to be her mama, because they had the same big nose and small chin and the same sad eyes like a cow. I didn’t bother telling them my name and they didn’t tell me theirs.

  The old woman said that until a few days ago they’d been let out in the courtyard to take in the sun. She said it was better here than at Fresnes and worse too. She said every day at four p.m. there was a roll call, and that was when thirty or forty women were rounded up and sent to Germany to one of the camps. She said sometimes they were taken out of the cells and beaten, for no reason at all, and that they weren’t allowed Red Cross packages, but had to get by on soup with maggots, bread, and rancid cheese.

  She said in French, “You have to be careful who you talk to because the Germans have filled this place with informers. They’re here to catch spies and Resistance fighters.” She said this like she was accusing me of something. Her mouth broke into a sly, ugly smile. “It’s not safe to talk to anyone, even to you. You might be working for them yourself.”

  I said in French, “I might. But I’m not.”

  She said, “You look like just the sort to work for them.”

  I said, “I’m sorry you think so.” I wanted to slap her across the face, but instead I turned to the other women and asked if any of them had a piece of paper and a pencil.

  The old woman said, “You aren’t allowed to write letters home.”

  “I don’t want to write a letter.” I wanted to write a song.

  “No paper,” she said. “No pencil.” She narrowed her eyes at me.

  “I have paper,” the girl with the sad cow eyes said in French. She carried a bag like mine over her shoulder and she stuck a hand inside and pulled out a few sheets of paper, torn in fourths, and a stubby pencil. I took one of the sheets from her and the pencil, promising to give it back. She said, “We write messages and hide them.” She waved me over to a corner near the window and showed me where part of the stone wall was crumbling away. “Here.”

  The old woman frowned at the girl, at the wall, at me. She started clucking to herself under her breath. The girl said in English, “If one of us leaves, we take them to give outside.” She meant to the outside world.

  I said, “Merci.” Then I said, “Do you know of a guard here named Niklaus Reiner?” The old woman was watching me. I wondered if she could be a spy or an informer for the Germans.

  The girl said, “No. But they are always changing guards. He may have been here or may still be here, I do not know. Sometimes the guards become too sympathetic and they are removed.”

  “Or shot,” the old woman said, and her eyes gleamed like a crow’s.

  I sat down on the floor, my back against the wall, and told myself to let them be. Better not to ask too many questions or call too much attention
. I tried to think of a song. I held the pencil over the paper, waiting. I tried to think of everything that had happened to me and everything I might want to say.

  Never confess.

  Good-bye forever to France.

  I am afraid.

  Don’t talk.

  Life is beautiful.

  Live out there.

  The words went swimming through my head till they blurred together and started looping around and around. I looked down at the paper and it was still empty and blank, and the pencil still sat in my hand, my fingers wrapped around it, the dull point of it hanging just above the page.

  That night, I lay in my bed, in the top story of one of the bunks, and went over the map of Romainville in my mind. I made myself remember every detail and as soon as I remembered it once, I remembered it again and then again. From what I could tell, I was in the eastern part of the building. In my mind, I counted exactly how many doors were between my cell and the main door, the one where they’d brought us in. I also counted how many doors were between the cell and the door at the end of the hall, which led out into the courtyard.

  Bedbugs lived in the wood frame of the bed, and I lay itching and scratching and remembering the locusts at Avenger Field. I climbed down, trying not to wake anyone up, and lifted the straw mattress off the frame and set it on the floor in front of the window.

  At curfew, a guard had come to count us and then double-locked the door, but we were allowed to keep the window open. I breathed in the night air. If I closed my eyes, I could almost trick myself into thinking I was in Nashville or Texas or even up on Fair Mountain. But then a great beam of light would sweep past—the spotlight they used to search the grounds—and then another, with exactly sixty seconds in between each sweep.

  I couldn’t count on Niklaus Reiner. I had to be ready to do this on my own. I could use my hairpins to open the window wide enough so that I could fit through. The yard was only a couple of feet below, and the drop would be easy, but before I tried to sneak out I needed to find Eleanor. Émile and Barzo might have already found a way to move her out of Romainville. I had asked the women in my cell if they knew of someone by that name. I had described her to them, but no one knew anything, or said they didn’t. She could still be there in another cell, or she might be locked up by herself. I knew from the map where the cachots were, the underground cells where they kept their most dangerous prisoners.