I was still planning as I drifted off. From somewhere in the distance there was the thunder of a cannon, and then the answer of machine guns. I felt myself drifting into the clouds, which hung in the sky outside the window, up above the courtyard. I drifted high and free and then I heard my mama’s voice singing.
The old woman had told me that once a week they’d been allowed a hot shower, a sunbath, and a chance to wash their clothes, but that now they wouldn’t let us out for any of these things. I was sure it had something to do with the Allies and the fighting and the cannon sounds in the night. The girl with the cow eyes showed me a piece of paper, which she kept hidden inside the hole in the wall, the one that held the messages. On it, she was tracking the progress of the Allies as they drew closer to Paris.
The next morning, I painted my lips for no reason, other than that it made me feel better and stronger—like Carole Lombard or Constance Kurridge. Or like Clementine Roux, who had made a promise to herself after her husband died to only wear red lipstick. One of the pregnant girls taught me to play bridge and Belote, a French card game, and I tried again to write a song, but I spent most of the morning at the window trying to figure a way out.
The guards here had let me keep the package of chewing gum. I thought about all the ways I could use it. I could blast the window, but then I’d have to make my way through the courtyard and past the guards who watched it. I could blast the cell door, but then I’d have to get past the matrons and the guards on the other side. If I could get to Eleanor, I could blast her out, but first I had to find her.
I said to the old woman, “What does it take to get put in the cachots?” I wanted to ask what was just enough to get you in there but not so much that they would kill you instead.
She narrowed her eyes and for one horrible moment I thought she was going to put a curse on my head. “What do you want with the cachots?”
“Are they as terrible as they say?”
“I have never been.” She spat on the floor and fixed her eyes on me. “You’d best not be up to something.” And then she let loose with a stream of angry French.
One of the other girls said, “The prisoners there are spies and murderers. Thieves. Traitors.”
“Do they lock them there when they first get here or are they sent there along the way?”
“Both.”
The old woman was still glaring at me. She said, “You ask too many questions.”
At four o’clock that afternoon, we lined up in front of our cells, and the guards marched up and down, their hobnail boots like hammers on the stone floor. While the guards read the list of names of those who would be deported, I searched the faces for the woman, Eleanor. I looked for the face in the photograph, but all I saw were cheeks that were too pale, and arms that were too thin, and eyes that were too hollow.
Four of the women from my cell were called—the old woman, the two pregnant girls, and the one with the crutch. The mother and daughter hung on to each other, and seeing them made me think of the little girl and boy, the sister and brother, at Fresnes. Where were they now?
Josef, the German from New York, stopped in front of me. “Looking for someone?”
I said, “There are just so many.”
“Not as many as there once were.” As the women were called, they shuffled forward and followed the guard past us, their chins high, their backs straight. Most of them stared at the head of the woman in front of them, but others waved to us and said, “Au revoir!” “À bientôt!” “Vive la France!”
Good-bye! See you soon! Long live France!
As I watched them pass, I thought: You are completely alone, Clementine. The only person who can save you is you. As if he knew what I was thinking, the German said, very low, so that only I could hear, “The Liberation is almost here, and I do not think you will be evacuated to Germany.”
His words made my heart lift, but I didn’t want it to lift if it wasn’t the truth. With my mind, I pushed my heart down again, back to where it was anchored around my stomach. I said, “What are you saying?”
“I think we’ll both be headed back to America before long.” Even though I knew he only wanted it to be true too, I let my heart go just a little.
On my mattress that night, a warm breeze blowing in through the window, I looked at the mother and daughter, still clinging together, their mattresses pushed side by side on the floor. The rest of the beds lay empty. After we’d been returned to the cell, now that we were all that was left, they had asked me my name. “Clementine,” I said. Before they could tell me theirs, I asked them, “If we go too, where would they take us?”
“Germany,” the mother said.
“And how would we go?”
“By train.” And then she’d drawn the route for me, as best she could.
Now I held the pencil in my hand, above the paper. Her map was on the back of it, and I studied this. I turned it over. Every time I started to write something, I stopped myself. I could only hear fragments of sentences, just a word here and there. Somewhere, far off, as far away as Rouen, maybe as far as Lisieux, I heard music, the faint, shadowy beginnings of a melody.
I think we’ll both be headed back to America before long.
A hopeful feeling surged up in my heart. It felt like spring. I let it rise a little higher in my chest, and I thought: Maybe I won’t have to get myself thrown into the cachots so I can find Eleanor. Maybe we’ll all be set free before that.
I wrote: Life is beautiful. As I looked at the words, small on the page—just words, just letters, nothing more than that—I felt a cold, dead creeping, like something was sneaking up on me from behind.
Underneath them I wrote: I am afraid.
THIRTY-ONE
I was holding my Mexican guitar and standing at a microphone. I was playing but I wasn’t singing, and I could feel the rough wood of the stage cool under my bare feet. I thought: Where are my shoes? Where did I put them? I tried to remember. I opened my eyes and stared down at my feet, and sure enough, they were naked. Then I looked up and out, and I was at the Grand Ole Opry, only all the seats were empty. I said, “Hello?” and my voice echoed back to me.
I almost walked off that stage, but then I thought: It took you an awfully long time to get here. Maybe if you start playing someone will show up.
I strummed the guitar again and opened my mouth to sing. I was trying to sing “Yellow Truck Coming, Yellow Truck Going,” but the words came out in French. So I started to sing a new song, one I knew I hadn’t written yet. These words were in French too. I thought: I wonder what that song is? I wonder if the words are any good?
No one was showing up, and I started to get mad. I lay my guitar down on the stage and said into the microphone, “What’s the good of being up here playing like this if there’s no one to listen?” I said, “I might as well just go on home as stand here.” I said it like a threat, but there was not a soul there to hear it. “All right,” I said. “Okay then. I mean it.”
I picked up the guitar and suddenly there was a scream, only it didn’t sound like a person. It was more like an animal or a monster. It sounded as if it were coming from outside the Opry, maybe as far away as the Lovelorn Café. I told myself: You’re dreaming. It’s only a dream. Wake up.
It was the worst scream I’d ever heard, and I lay the guitar back down and sat myself on the stage and decided I wasn’t going anywhere as long as that monster was outside.
On second thought, I told myself, don’t wake up. Don’t you do it. If you wake up, it might be something bad. Stay in the dream.
I put my hands over my ears, but the sound came in anyway, and as I looked out into the black of the theater, I saw a white face shining there, watching me. At first I thought it was the monster, but then I could see that it was Judge Hay, the man who decided who sang at the Opry and who didn’t. Even as I covered my ears, I thought: I hope he’s not disappointed that no one came to hear me. I hope he doesn’t think he made a mistake.
He said, �
�They are coming,” but to be sure of it I took my hands off my ears and said, “Sir?”
“They are coming.” His voice was high and girlish, and it didn’t make sense with his face, with the cigar that stuck out of his mouth like a hand ready to be shaken. His lips weren’t even moving, but he kept saying it. “They are coming. They are coming, Clementine.”
I wanted to tell him that this wasn’t my name, that I’d had another name, a long time ago, but I couldn’t think what it was.
“Clementine!” Suddenly I opened my eyes and the girl, the one who’d given me paper and a pencil, was standing over me, her thin face, sallow as candle wax, staring into mine. The screaming was louder than in my dream, but it wasn’t a monster at all—it was an air raid siren. I could see her mother brush behind her, dark clothes fluttering like bird’s wings. The girl said, “They are coming for us.”
Romainville was like a military fort, with cold stone walls and long, low brick buildings that sat in a square. The courtyard was in the middle of this, and we stood in the courtyard, some three hundred women, carrying our bags and purses and, in some cases, suitcases—whatever they’d let us keep—and waited. They divided us into groups by the letters of our last names and told us the buses were coming to pick us up, but they wouldn’t say where the buses were taking us. Then they handed out parcels from the Red Cross and told us these had to last us for the journey, but they wouldn’t say how long that journey would be.
We weren’t allowed to talk to each other, so we waited in silence, under a blinding sun, and an hour went by and then another and another. I stood, my legs going to sleep, sweat running down my back, my hand at my side, my fist closed up around the paper messages, which I’d taken from the hiding place in the wall of our cell. I’d only had time to write two words on my piece of paper, so that besides Life is beautiful, I am afraid, it now said, Leaving here.
I made sure I was last in my line. I thought: Maybe the buses won’t come and we’ll go back to our cells and I can figure out how to find this Eleanor. I looked for her in the crowd, but all the faces were blurring together until they looked the same—thin, pale faces with eyes like tree hollows.
Maybe they won’t come.
At three o’clock, there was the sound of something in the distance. At first it was a rumble, and then there came a grinding of gears like a tank was trying to make its way down the hill toward us. The guards started hollering, and the gates to the courtyard were thrown open so that we could see the buses. They were painted a dark, ugly green.
Men came down from the buses and started shouting at us. These were the SS, Hitler’s personal bodyguards. They were the cruelest of all the German soldiers. They waved their guns and jabbed them into our backs and every single one of them, handsome or plain, had a horrible, sharp face, mean as a jackal’s. A woman behind me said in French, “Thank God we are leaving. There will be a massacre in the prison.”
Some of the women stumbled as they climbed into the first of the buses. The guards shouted and one of them raised the butt of his gun and hit a young woman on the side of her head. Up on the bus, it was like breathing into a hot, wet towel. The air lay still and heavy and for one terrible moment I thought I was going to faint. The door closed behind me, and I was standing by the driver because there wasn’t anywhere to sit and there wasn’t anywhere else to stand. He was a Frenchman.
The driver was to the left of me, and there was an SS guard on my right with his gun pointed at the door, waiting for someone to rush past him. He moved his eyes over us like one of those prison spotlights, sweeping up and then back, up and then back. The buses behind us were filling up with the other groups, and so we waited there, the engine idling, the air growing hotter and heavier till I was breathing with my mouth open, as if I were underwater.
I felt someone poke me from behind and then there was a piece of paper tucking into my hand, the one that was empty. I felt another piece of paper there and another. I wanted to say: No. Keep them. You’ll get me in trouble. Someone rapped on the door to the bus and I almost jumped through my skin. The SS guard pushed the door open and leaned out to talk to the guard outside.
I said to the bus driver, “J’ai des messages.” I have messages. I held out my hands, trying to keep them low. When I opened them I saw the franc notes someone had passed me. “Et l’argent.” And money.
The driver slid his hand out and took them from me. Before I could say thank you, he said in English, “I have been driving prisoners all day and yesterday. From Fresnes, from Cherche-Midi, now here. I am sickened.”
“Are all the prisoners being evacuated?”
“Yes.”
“Where are the Allies?”
“They are here.”
“Then the Liberation…?”
“It is soon.”
The SS guard clattered back into the bus and shouted an order at the driver. I pretended that I’d just been standing and not talking and not doing anything but waiting. We lurched backward, all of us falling and grabbing on to anything—the seats, windows, one another. The driver was trying to get that bus up the hill, but there were too many of us. He surged up and then back, up and then back, and finally they made us get out and follow the buses on foot.
At the top of the hill, they loaded us in again, and we rumbled off through the streets of Paris, passing shops and cafés and parks where people were gathered like it was any other day. As we rattled by, they stopped what they were doing to watch, their faces washed over by fear and pity, and gratitude that it wasn’t them.
Most Paris rail stations had been destroyed by bombing, but Gare de Pantin sat in a neighborhood just outside the city, and it hadn’t even been touched. Boxcars were lined up, as endless as the Scenic. In every window in every car faces crowded together. Eyes peered out of narrow openings and the cracks of half-closed doors.
Where are they going?
Other green buses arrived, and these carried male prisoners. The men looked as thin and pale as the women. For the first time, I wasn’t sure I could do whatever the next thing was, and I froze. I told myself: Move, Clementine. Move now before they make you move. But my legs were rooted like a tree.
Behind me a voice said, “Allons-y maintenant.” We must go now. She spoke in French, but she didn’t sound French. There was a hand on my back, pressing me forward, then a hand in mine, guiding me. I closed my eyes and let myself be pulled. I should never have come. I should have gotten myself home on the Freedom Line. I wasn’t a soldier or a spy. I was just a girl who could drive an old yellow truck and sing some songs and fly a plane.
All of a sudden I was bumped and shoved off the bus, herded up and moving toward a boxcar that said “30 horses—40 men” on the side. It didn’t say anything about women. Before I could think to run or scream, I was inside the boxcar, swept in by the tide, and squeezing together with sixty other women. The woman still held my hand. She said, “Ici.” Here. We sat down near the door. A thin layer of straw covered the floor, and we sat with our backs against the walls of the car or against the backs of one another, knees tucked up tight to make room for everyone else. Some of the women had a suitcase or box with them, and they stacked these along the walls.
The woman said, “Magda.” She held out her hand to me. I thought: Don’t make me learn your name. You’ll disappear, and I’ll disappear, and I would rather not know it because you’ll just be one more person I know who’s gone.
I shook her hand and said, “Clementine.”
One of the women said in French and then in English, “Breathe the air while you can. Remember the feeling of it.” I closed my eyes and breathed it in, and it was the warm, sweet air of summer.
I opened my eyes and took in the wide blue sky, and I saw that Red Cross workers were moving up and down the line of cars. One of them came to us and she was young but looked old. She held out drinking water to everyone, and arms and hands reached for it, for her. She said, “You’ll never get to Germany. You will be liberated before then.”
But all I heard was Germany.
When it was my turn, I reached my hand out for water, and I reached my head out too so that I could breathe the air in. Women were being shoved into the boxcar next to mine. They all looked the same—thin and ragged and frightened. They each had the look of a dog with mange, which was how I looked and how the rest of us looked too. One of the women turned just then. From the back I thought she was a girl, but she was actually older than me, though I couldn’t tell how much. She had black hair and a heart-shaped face and arched eyebrows that gave her a fierce look.
Eleanor.
Before I could think what to do, the door to the boxcar slammed shut and there were only slivers of light, thin as reeds, falling across our legs and faces. The women at the back of the car, the ones in the corners, started grumbling, and I was suddenly glad about where I was sitting. I rested my face against the door and felt the air coming through the cracks, into my ear, onto my cheek. I tried to keep sight of Eleanor, still outside, but all I could see was earth and sky.
Minutes later, there was a tug that knocked me backward, and then another and another as the train began to move. I planted my feet into the sawdust and shifted my weight so I wouldn’t topple over. The train built up speed till we were clacking along the tracks. I put one eye to the crack by the door, watching as a blur of colors rushed by.
I suddenly remembered my compass, the one in my shoulder pad. I pulled at my jacket, trying to get it off, which was almost impossible since I was smashed against women on my left and right, front and back. I was finally able to wrench it off, nearly ripping it in two, and set it in my lap. Some of the women were starting to cry and argue. I felt in the shoulder pads with my fingers until I found the compass and tore it free, and then I held it in the flat of my palm up to the light, trying to keep my hand steady.
Becoming Clementine: A Novel Page 25