Becoming Clementine: A Novel

by Jennifer Niven

  Northeast. Just as the Red Cross worker had said. They were taking us to Germany.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes later, there was the clear gonging of bells. Magda said, “Notre Dame. It’s the largest of the bells, Emmanuel. The last time it rang was midnight on June 14, 1940, the day the Germans entered Paris.”

  The women in the car started singing “La Marseillaise,” their voices rising above the bells and the clattering of the wheels against the tracks. I sang along in French and then I switched to English. Someone else nearby was singing in English also, and even in different languages, I thought we sounded better than any chorus on the Grand Ole Opry stage.

  March on, march on!

  All hearts resolv’d

  On victory or death!

  The song spread to the other cars until everyone, women and men, was singing. The bell chimed on, even after our voices faded off, and I thought: Emmanuel is telling us good-bye.

  We rattled onward into the night, pressed together in the heat without air or water. A woman next to me licked the sweat off her wrist. Some of the women stripped down to their underclothes. A tin bucket sat in the corner of the car, and this was the toilet.

  I opened my Red Cross parcel, which was sugar and crackers and a tin of jam and a bar of chocolate. I opened the chocolate and a woman behind me said, “It might be poisoned.” She sat with her parcel closed up on her lap. Some of the women were talking and I could hear the edge in their voices, which sounded too high in the dark boxcar, and too bright. A few of the women were still crying, and others sat silent, staring in front of them at nothing.

  We slept in shifts because there wasn’t enough room to lie down. Half of us stretched out as much as we could the first part of the night, and then the other half slept during the second part. I sat up the whole time, my head bumping against the door. I was too tired to lie down and too tired to take shifts.

  Sometime the next morning, we passed into a tunnel, the yellow splinters of daylight disappearing all at once, leaving us in blackness. The train churned to a halt, still inside the tunnel. One of the women had a book of matches, and she lit them over and over while another woman, who had a watch, kept a record of how long we were there.

  After one hour, we were still sitting on the tracks. The air was thick with black smoke, and we could hear the sound of the heavy German boots as they ran alongside the boxcars. The Germans shouted at each other. One of the women said, “They are trying to asphyxiate us.”

  Another said, “The tracks were blown. They are trying to figure out what to do.”

  Two hours later, we hadn’t moved. The women on the left of me and the right of me took my hands and held them. You are not alone, they were saying. I am here. We are all here together. Down the line of cars, women and men were shouting: “Give us air!” “Give us water!” “Give us food!” The women in my car started shouting it too, banging on the walls, on the door. I thought: They are leaving us here to die. The Germans have gone off and left us and when the war is over they’ll find us here, hundreds of us on this train. They’ll write it up in the newspapers for the folks in England and back home, and the headline will call it “Death’s Waiting Room.”

  The women started shouting at one another. One pushed past us and threw herself at the door, crying out in French. She clawed at a crack in the wall until her fingers started bleeding, and then another woman pushed her away and started to scream. Magda squeezed my hand like she was strangling the women. She said, “Idiots. They are causing a panic. They will use up all the air.”

  The women were pushing each other and crying out: “Give us air!” “Give us water!” Before I even had a song in my head, I started to sing, and it was a song I’d never sung before except in a dream. In the dream, I’d sung the words in French, but now I sang them in English. It was a song for Mama, like a prayer. It was a song about living out there and being lost and making a new start, which was also an old start. It was about finding your way.

  Little by little, the women in our car started to settle, quieting down and sitting down and drawing themselves in until all you could hear was their breathing.

  While I sang, the hairs raised up on my neck and my arms and my back, as if I’d seen a ghost. Those words and that tune came out of nowhere, out of the thin, close air of the boxcar. I thought: Maybe there isn’t any heaven and maybe we stay in the ground when we die, just like weeds or roots or the red beads Daddy Hoyt offers to the earth after he takes something from it, but as long as there is music, I believe.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Sometime after sunup, they opened the doors to the boxcars and marched us to the top of a high, steep hill that dropped down like a waterfall into the trees and empty fields and a village no bigger than Alluvial that sat on the flat land at the bottom. Not counting the guards, there must have been three thousand of us, spread out across the hilltop like an entire city of sad, lost people. Some of the men had stripped off their shirts and stood half-naked in the sun. One of the SS guards perched below us, one leg bent up the hillside, and in French and then English shouted at us about not trying to escape. He said for every person who tried to run away, they would shoot ten prisoners and leave them on the hillside or in the woods for the animals to feed on.

  For the most part, the guards seemed calmer and braver the closer we got to Germany. We could hear them in the night and in the morning, picking off people on the sides of the road with their guns, just like they were playing a game of Shoot the Can. They rounded up people into groups, from one boxcar to the next, and barked at us to pay attention, to not give them trouble.

  I slipped to the back of my group and into the one from the next car. Without calling attention to myself, I stood still, scanning the crowd for Eleanor. When I didn’t see her, I moved up a little and then up again. I bumped into one of the other women and she snapped at me in French.

  Then, to the left of me, I spotted a woman with short black hair. From the back she looked like a girl. I slid over to her, careful not to bump anyone, until I was standing next to her. In the bright of day, I got a look at her for the first time. She was shorter than I was by a good four or five inches and had black hair that waved into a widow’s peak and eyebrows drawn in neat arches. Her eyes were blue and bright and she had a small, delicate face shaped like a heart. Those bright eyes passed over me and then moved off as if they were bored, as if there were nothing much to see, and settled on one of the guards. Without moving her head, she followed him, and I wondered if she was trying to judge how much time she had to escape.

  At first sight, I didn’t like her. I thought: That’s it? That’s her? There was nothing so special or different about her, nothing to make her stand out in a crowd, to make you think, That must be someone so important that the Germans would capture her and lock her away and England would want to rescue her and three men—Coleman, Perry, Ray—would die for her. To look at her, she didn’t seem worth the fuss.

  The SS moved through our ranks, lining us up two by two. They handcuffed us to the person next to us, then they started marching the first group down the hill. Our group fell somewhere in the middle, and I made sure I was handcuffed to Eleanor. Guards moved in front of us and guards moved in back and guards stalked along the sides of us too. We stumbled over the hill and through the fields, skirting the woods toward the village.

  In French I said, “I was supposed to free you.”

  In French she said, “Sorry? I can’t understand what you’re saying to me.” Her voice was chilly and British, neat as a pin.

  “I was supposed to free you.”

  “Sorry. Your accent is impossible.”

  I said, as slow as could be, “I was supposed to free you.”

  She stared at me, and I knew she’d understood. “You were supposed to free me? You? Bloody hell.”

  “We were supposed to free you, I mean. My team.” I looked ahead and she looked ahead, so that no one would see we were talking. “But I was captured early and they sent me to
Fresnes instead.”

  She said, “I wondered where in the bloody hell you were.”

  I told myself: She’s been through a lot. You don’t even know what. She may have been tortured. She’s important to the Allies. For some reason they need her. Do not kill her even if you want to.

  I said, “I’m Clementine.”

  She said, “Eleanor.” But I knew it was a name that had been given to her, and along with it was a whole story about an Eleanor Marchand or an Eleanor Dupree, and not a word of it was true. I couldn’t help myself—I wanted to know everything about her. What was her real name. What kind of work did she do. How did they catch her. Why did they catch her. What kinds of secrets did she know. She said, “Are you OSS?”

  “No.”

  “Not SOE?”

  “I’m a WASP.” When it was clear she didn’t know what this was, I said, “A pilot.”

  “They sent me a pilot? A woman pilot? Not even a woman, but a girl. How old are you?”

  That did it. I said, “I’m sure you’ve been asked the exact same question. I’m sure there are plenty of people who aren’t too thrilled by you doing what you do and being a woman.”

  She drew her mouth in and looked away.

  Finally I said, “Why did they make us get off the train?”

  “There was trouble on the line. Someone sabotaged the track. Probably the Allies are too close and they want to hide us away before we’re intercepted.”

  Or maybe they’re taking us into the woods to kill us, I thought. Maybe they’re going to shoot us dead and then leave us there for the animals.

  We slowed to a shuffle because there was a bridge up ahead, and we had to march across in lines of eight. I was suddenly so scared of being shot that I didn’t talk to Eleanor again until we’d passed through the village and down a long dirt road with fields on either side. As soon as we were on the road and the guards were spread out farther, she said, “Does your team know where you are?”

  “I don’t know.” I wondered if the bus driver had delivered my message by now or if he would. The messages could be lying in a trash heap or in the hands of the Germans. Or something could have happened to Émile. I pushed this last thought out of my head. I said, “We may have to do this on our own.”

  “That could be tricky.”

  “Maybe before they load us onto another bus or train. Maybe in all the confusion. There’s always a way.” I wasn’t sure this was true, but it was usually true about most things.

  She said, “Maybe.”

  We marched for two or three miles under the hot, white sun. The clouds had burned off and my hair was damp and sticking to my neck. My head had gone light and I was making myself concentrate as hard as I could so that I would keep going, even if they were making us walk all the way to Germany. When a woman, thin as a broom handle, wobbled and swayed and then crumpled onto the ground, one of the guards shot her in the dirt, right where she lay, and then he shot the woman handcuffed to her just so he wouldn’t have to go to the trouble to bend over and unlock her. He stepped over them and shouted at the rest of us to stay on our feet or he’d do the same to us.

  Eleanor said, “If you faint or fall, so help me, I’ll kill you before he can.”

  I thought, Right back at you, sister. I almost wished I could shoot her right then. I wondered if she’d been hard before the war or if it had turned her this way. I hoped I wasn’t turning hard too.

  I tried not to look at the dead women, tried not to think about them. I kept my eyes on the road, on the sky, on the trees, on the person in front of me. I thought: Just one step. One step at a time. You don’t have to do them all at once.

  We came to a place in the road where the trees were blown down, like a storm had swept through. Some of the trees lay across the road, and we had to climb over or walk around. I kept thinking: Is now the time? If we ran away now, how far could we go?

  Eleanor nodded at the trees. She said, “The Allies were here, trying to slow the Germans down.”

  We passed wrecked gliders, their cockpits and wings completely ripped apart. We passed bombed-out fields, dead cows, and houses burned to the ground, which I knew meant we were getting closer to the battle action. We came across a bridge that had been destroyed, still smoking from the fires.

  I put my hand over my mouth and nose so I wouldn’t breathe in the smoke. The bridge was on the edge of a village, and the village was nothing but rubble. People climbed about in the shells of buildings and houses and stood on hilltops of brick and stone, digging and sifting and searching. As we marched by, they stopped what they were doing and stared at us, and even though their homes had been knocked down and their town was gone, they looked at us sadly, like they were sorry, like they were grateful that, as bad as it was, at least they weren’t us.

  Some of the male prisoners called out, “Bon courage. Vive la France!” Take good heart. Long live France! And a young man slid down from a mound of ash and stone and ran alongside us. A woman two rows in front of me was dragging a heavy bag. Her arms were thin as bird wings and she was sagging from the heat and the strain. The young man took the bag from her and another bag from someone else, and he walked beside us carrying them. The guards ignored him and let him be.

  A mile later we reached a flat field of land with train tracks running through it. A small building grew up alongside the tracks, looking as if it had somehow shot up out of the earth like a tree. A long freight train sat there, all its doors open so that we could see it was empty. As we got closer, I saw figures in white moving about on the platform.

  I said, “The Red Cross is here.” The sign of their clean white uniforms made me hopeful. At least we aren’t forgotten, I thought. At least someone remembers we’re here.

  The guards said the train would leave in an hour, but instead of crowding us back into the boxcars, they let us sit down on the side of the tracks, on a little rise in the ground, and eat our potatoes and drink our milk. I said to Eleanor, “We could climb this hill and go down the other side.” I wondered if there was a way to slip behind the station while everyone was boarding, to lose ourselves in the crowd and then pull away at the last minute. The station building was built up on bricks so that there was an open space, narrow and dark, running underneath. I wondered if we could roll under there and hide and wait till the train was gone.

  She was studying the guards just like I was. She said, “They’re watching us too closely. They’re too on edge. Any sudden, strange movement, and I’m afraid they’ll shoot everyone.” I thought she was giving up too easily and I said so. She said, “Maybe. But it’s been a long war. You Americans have been fighting in it the day before yesterday, but we’ve been in it for years. Maybe the fight’s going out of me.”

  I said, “Because it’s a long war, that’s when you should fight the hardest.”

  I started telling her about my brother Beachard, who was over in the Pacific, and how no one ever thought he would live to grow up, and now he was something like a major in the Marines, when he’d only started as a medic who didn’t carry a gun. It was a story meant to inspire her, but suddenly she started singing “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue.” She sang it like she was bored silly, like she was telling me I was free to leave, that she was done here.

  I said, “Do you know how many men have died to save you? Three of my team members were killed on this mission, eight if you count the original team that flew to France from England, five of them who died when we crash-landed, not to mention all the members of my crew, which makes a total of fifteen. I don’t think it would hurt you to show some manners. And I’ll tell you this: I’m not going to Germany if I can help it. And you’re not going either if I can help it. But I am not doing this alone.”

  She had stopped singing. She sat a long time, staring off toward the train and the guards. Her expression didn’t change, but she tilted her nose slightly, in such a way that I could tell I’d offended her. Good, I thought.

  The sun was beginning to drop in the sky when
they loaded us onto the train. We pulled out of the station, and once again I sat by the door. A guard was assigned to each car. They locked the doors and then they rode with the other guards, two or three cars away.

  Eleanor and a few of the other women spoke German, but the guards didn’t know they spoke German, which meant that they could tell us every little thing the guards said to one another. The car next to ours was a hospital car, filled with women who were ill or dying. Eleanor said the Germans planned to leave these women in a place called Bar-le-Duc and let them fend for themselves. She said the Germans considered these women dead already and didn’t feel the need to carry any extra weight.

  A lock hung on the outside of our door—we could see it through the crack—and I was going to try to reach through the opening and crack the lock open with one of my hairpins. If I could get my arm out and if I could reach the lock and if I could unlock it, we were going to jump. If I couldn’t unlock it, I’d blast it open with the chewing gum explosive. We’d roll into the bushes or grass away from the train and then we’d hide there till it pushed on past. Eleanor said there were two more stops before Germany—Bar-le-Duc and Nancy.

  I kept an eye to the crack and every now and then a sign blurred past. This was how I knew we were still in France, because all of the writing was in French. This filled me with hope because it would be easier for us if we could break free before we crossed into Germany. The air in the car was hot as an oven. The women who had the energy fanned themselves with their hands, and the others just closed their eyes, their faces wet and red from the heat.

  Eleanor sat beside and behind me, so that she could block the view of the door. I pulled a bobby pin out of my hair and flicked off the rubber ends, and then I tugged on the side of the door and tried to slip my free hand, the one that wasn’t cuffed to Eleanor’s, out through the crack. I couldn’t move the door an inch by tugging it, so I worked and wormed my hand out. The crack was only a couple of inches wide. My hand slipped out, holding the bobby pin, but I still couldn’t reach the lock. I wriggled and wiggled my arm, which was thin from weeks of not eating much, but not thin enough. The skin scraped raw and began bleeding in spots, but I kept wriggling, kept wiggling, until finally I could just feel the warm metal of the lock in my fingers.