by Valpy, Fiona
Whenever they could afford it, the three friends would go and sit in one of the cafés on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in the evenings after work, where it was warmer than in the apartment above Delavigne Couture. They’d order a bowl of watery cabbage broth, crumbling pieces of hard bread into it, and try to make their supper last as long as possible so that they could delay the moment when they’d have to go home and climb between bedsheets that felt damp with cold. From a corner in one of the cafés, Radio Paris declaimed reports of the latest German victories. Back in the safety of the apartment, Vivi whispered that many of these were lies. The radio station was German-controlled. In reality, their armies were suffering more defeats than successes these days, stretched across many fronts. Mireille took heart from that, and didn’t ask Vivi how she knew these things. But, at the same time, she was aware that the three seamstresses were taking greater risks than ever in their Resistance work. A new French police force had been set up, known as the Milice, and they were intent on capturing as many members of the Resistance as possible. It had been announced that there would be a twenty-thousand-franc reward for denouncing a Résistant, a strongly tempting incentive for citizens who were starving and one that was already proving horribly effective.
It had taken a while to re-establish the lines of communication through the network after the losses of last year. Everything seemed a lot less stable these days. Safe houses were changed frequently and Mireille was instructed to use different routes for each ‘delivery’ she did, to try and avoid the possibility of detection by the Milice and the Gestapo.
She shivered as she stood beneath the clock at the Gare de l’Est, watching its hands tick slowly round to the half hour. The train she’d been instructed to meet was overdue, but there was nothing unusual in that. Timetables were less and less reliable and often trains were cancelled completely if the rolling stock or the line was needed by the German forces for other purposes. It was another bitterly cold day and her winter coat provided little protection against the easterly wind that cut through the worn fabric. She looked up as a train pulled in at one of the platforms, but it appeared to be an empty freight service as no passengers got off.
Then a shouted command made her jump. ‘Out of the way! Stand aside!’ She pressed herself against the brick column that supported the clock as two soldiers waved their rifles to clear a way though. Behind them, escorted by more armed soldiers, a line of female prisoners were marched across the station concourse and over to the platform where the empty train waited.
Some of the women were smartly dressed, others were dirty and dishevelled; some of them wept, while other faces were blank with shock. But Mireille could smell the fear on all of them as they passed close to where she stood – a mixture of sweat and urine and breath that was stale with dread.
One woman reached out to Mireille and thrust a folded scrap of paper into her hand as she was hurried past. ‘Please, madame,’ she begged, ‘get this message to my husband.’
A soldier gave her a shove with the butt of his rifle. ‘Back in line!’ he screamed at her. Then he pushed Mireille with the flat of his hand so that she had to take a step backwards, and snarled at her, ‘And you – stay out of the way. Unless you want to join them.’
The women were loaded into the freight cars while the soldiers patrolled the platform, sliding the heavy doors shut when the carriages were full. With horror, Mireille noticed that the sides of the trucks were formed from wooden planks with gaps between them. What would become of those women as the train rolled eastwards into the wind which would slice through those gaps like a cold steel blade?
She glanced at the piece of paper in her hand. It was a folded note, with an address printed on the outside. She pushed it into her coat pocket as the train she’d been waiting for pulled up at another platform. The note would have to wait: she had work to do.
Later that day, once she’d delivered the man she’d met from the train to a safe house in the sixteenth arrondissement, she picked up her bike where she’d left it near the station and took a detour on her way home to deliver the note to the address which had been scribbled on the folded paper. She knocked on the door, but there was no reply. The house appeared to be deserted, the door locked.
She hesitated for a moment, leaning her bike against the wall, then unfolded the note in case there was any other clue in it as to who it was intended for. Her eye scanned the hastily written scrawl.
My dearest, they have taken me. I don’t know where I’m going, but I will come back to you as soon as I can. Look after our girls. I pray for their safety and yours. Kiss them from their maman who loves them – and you – forever. Nadine.
She looked around, unsure what to do, and then noticed a curtain twitch in the window of the house next door. She knocked there. After a few moments’ hesitation, the neighbour opened her door a crack, peering at her suspiciously.
‘I have a letter,’ Mireille explained. ‘For the man next door. His wife asked me to deliver it to him.’
The neighbour shook her head. ‘He’s gone. The Germans came and took them all, the father and the two kids. Gone – I don’t know where.’
‘Could you keep this for them? Give it to them when they come back?’
The neighbour looked at her doubtfully, then reluctantly extended a hand through the gap in the door to take the note. ‘Alright, I’ll keep it. But they won’t come back. They never do, do they?’
She shut her door with a finality that seemed to underscore her words.
Shaken, Mireille cycled slowly back to the Rue Cardinale, through frozen streets that seemed eerily empty.
She propped her bike in the hallway and climbed the stairs to the apartment, feeling exhausted. It had been a long day and she was chilled to the bone, having cycled miles into the icy wind. She was back much later than she’d anticipated and was looking forward to the company of Claire and Vivi and a bowl of warm soup. She paused on the stairway to pick up a glove that had been dropped there. It looked like one of Claire’s. Mireille smiled – she’d be glad to have it back.
She opened the door and stepped into a silence so profound that it made her ears ring. ‘Claire?’ she called. ‘Vivi?’
There was no reply. She shrugged. They must have gone out – maybe to the café. Claire would be missing her glove, in that case. The door to Claire’s room stood ajar and she pushed it open, meaning to leave the glove on Claire’s pillow. But she stopped in the doorway, a sense of profound unease seeping into her bones. The room was untidy, drawers pulled open and clothes dropped on the floor. The cupboard door swung on its hinges and Mireille could see the silver beads of the midnight blue evening gown glinting within, although the few other clothes that used to hang there alongside the dress were gone.
She ran to Vivi’s room, panic flooding her veins now. If anything, it was even worse. A chair was overturned and the contents of the wardrobe and chest of drawers were strewn across the bed. A jar of pens and pencils which had sat on the windowsill lay smashed on the floor, and sheets of crumpled paper had been scattered from the overturned wastepaper bin.
Mireille sank slowly to the floor and buried her face in her hands. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Not Vivi. Not Claire. You should have taken me, not them.’
It was only later, when she reached the dyer’s shop, gasping for breath having run all the way and hammering on his door, begging him to let her in, that she realised she was still clutching Claire’s lost glove.
Mireille must have forgotten her key, Claire had thought, as she went down to answer the door. So she was smiling when she opened it. But her smile froze into a mask of horror when she registered the black and silver insignia on the caps of the three men who stood there.
Over the past few months, the anxiety she’d felt following her encounter with Ernst that summer’s day outside the Vélodrôme d’Hiver had receded into the background and over time had become just one of the facets of the ever-present tapestry of fear that formed the backdrop to daily li
fe in a time of war. Every now and then, he would invade her troubled dreams and she’d wake to find Vivi at her bedside again, having been awoken herself by Claire’s cries, hushing her, reassuring her that everything was alright.
But now she found herself in a nightmare from which no one could awaken her. The look of cold impassivity on the faces of the three men was more horrifying to her than the grotesquely leering gargoyles that had pursued her in her dreams. She felt a numbness descend in her mind and her body as the first of the men demanded that she take them upstairs to the apartment so that they could investigate a report they’d received.
‘What kind of a report?’ she asked, playing for time.
‘Suspected subversive activities on the premises,’ the Gestapo officer had barked back, holding out a hand to gesture that she should lead the way.
Her feet felt like lumps of lead as she climbed the stairs. She led them past the door to the sewing room, which was closed, as it always was at the weekends. Please, she prayed silently, let Vivi be in there. Let her hear them and hide. And don’t let Mireille return while they’re here. Let them search my room and find nothing and leave.
She found her voice then, forcing herself to speak so that if Vivi were in the atelier it would be a warning to her. ‘I can’t imagine what these “subversive activities” that you refer to might be,’ she said, as calmly as possible. She turned to look back to where they followed, close on her heels. ‘We make clothes here, nothing else.’
‘Shut up and keep going!’ One of the men gave her a push which made her almost lose her footing so that she had to grab the stair rail to stop herself falling forwards. She resumed the climb, treading heavily, deliberately, on each step so that if Vivi was in the apartment she might hear her coming.
‘But really, messieurs, I cannot imagine why you are here. As you will see, we have nothing to hide.’ Again she protested, raising her voice as much as she dared so that her words would carry, in the hope that they would alert Vivi to the additional sounds made by the three pairs of heavy boots on the staircase.
‘In that case, mademoiselle, you have nothing to fear from our visit, do you?’ The second man’s tone was a sinister sneer.
As she opened the door to the apartment, one of the men grabbed her arm and held it in a steely grip. She could feel the fingers of his black leather gloves bruising her skin through the layers of winter clothes she wore. The other two kicked open the doors leading off the hallway and Claire caught a glimpse of Mireille’s empty room. Then she saw Vivi’s startled expression and the quick movement of her hands as she pulled what looked like a pair of earphones from her head. Some sort of radio set sat on the table beside her.
‘Well, well, what have we here?’ The Gestapo officer shot a triumphant grin at his colleague. ‘We thought we’d come to trawl for sardines and instead it looks as if we’ve caught a shark in our net. What an unexpected pleasure!’
Claire made as if to run to Vivi, but the man gripping her arm shook her so hard that she bit her tongue, her mouth filling with the metallic taste of blood. ‘Oh no you don’t!’ he shouted at her. ‘And where’s your other friend? We were told there were three of you.’
Claire shook her head. ‘She’s not here. She left.’ Thinking fast, she said, loudly enough for Vivi to hear, ‘She went out one day last week and never came back. We don’t know what’s happened – perhaps you can tell us, monsieur?’ Defiantly, she looked him in the eye.
He raised a black-gloved hand and slapped her cheek, hard. ‘We ask the questions and you give us the answers. I hope you are a quick learner, mademoiselle, otherwise you’re going to make things a whole lot worse for yourself. And for your friend, here, too.’
Tears ran down Claire’s face, their saltiness mingling with the blood in her mouth, but she pressed her lips together and refused to cry out. She heard a crash from Vivi’s room and craned her neck to try to see what was happening, but the man pushed her into her own room and slammed the door, barking, ‘Stay there until I say you can come out.’ She heard his footsteps crossing the hallway as he went to join his colleagues.
Desperately, she cast around for something she could do to distract them from Vivienne. Could she create a diversion? Lead them away? Go and get help? For a second, she wondered whether she could squeeze through the tiny window and escape across the rooftops, but even if she could get out she knew that she couldn’t leave Vivi, the friend who had sat by her bedside, soothing her in the aftermath of her nightmares, calming her fears.
It had become clear that Vivi held a key role in the network and that she must have been passing on crucial information to the Resistance, but she’d never suspected that Vivi had a wireless receiver hidden in her room. What other secrets was Vivi party to? Her close relationship with Monsieur Leroux could be the downfall of the whole network. Claire trembled as she thought how many lives were at stake.
All at once, Claire knew what she needed to do. She had to try to stick with Vivienne, to help her stay strong and not divulge what she knew. Together, they had to hold out for twenty-four hours, that’s what they’d been told. Mireille would be able to alert the others. It was up to Claire and Vivienne to buy them the time to cover their tracks. Wherever they were going, she was determined that they would go there together.
Quickly, she started pushing as many warm clothes as she could into a bag. Then she jumped with fright as her bedroom door was kicked open again. ‘Well done, mademoiselle, I see you have had the foresight to pack for a little holiday,’ sneered the officer. ‘Well, let us see how you like our departure lounge on the Avenue Foch.’
The other two were already marching Vivi down the stairs as the man pushed Claire out of the apartment. She hurried to try to catch up with her friend, dropping one of her gloves as she went. She tried to pick it up but he gave her another shove, sending her sprawling headlong on to the next landing. Again, she felt the vice-like grip of his fingers as he pulled her to her feet and forced her to continue onwards down the stairs and out into the Rue Cardinale.
A black car was parked there and Claire found herself bundled into the back, next to Vivi. She shot a glance at her friend’s face. One eye was swelling, beginning to close, but otherwise she just looked deeply shocked. Claire felt for her hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m here,’ she whispered, echoing the words Vivi used to say when Claire’s nightmares woke them both. ‘Everything will be alright.’
Vivienne turned to look at Claire then, as if only just registering her presence for the first time. Her eyes were glazed with fear, but she focused on her friend’s face and nodded once. Then she gave Claire’s hand a squeeze in return and they held on to each other tightly as the car sped through the streets of Paris, heading west.
Harriet
Shocked by the knowledge that Claire was arrested and taken to the Gestapo headquarters for questioning, I’ve been reading some reports that I’ve found online about inherited trauma. There’s no doubt my grandmother must have been terrified at being captured and that she must have felt horrendously guilty that Vivi was caught too, apparently operating a wireless radio set from her attic room.
I read an article that says new research in the field of genetics has shown that an increased likelihood of suffering from depression can be inherited. Trauma can cause changes in some areas of a person’s DNA, it says, and these changes can be passed on to the next generations, one after the other.
I’m beginning to see how high the odds were stacked against my mother. Was there a genetic fragility in her make up – changes to her DNA that she inherited from the trauma Claire suffered – that caused her to snap when life’s knocks came? In her case, they came one after the other, like powerful waves knocking her off her feet. Abandonment, divorce, the demands of raising a child alone . . . Each time she tried to get up again, another wave knocked her back down. Some of the anger and hurt that I’ve felt towards my mother for years begins to shift slightly as I re-examine her life in this new light.
It takes me a few days to pluck up the courage, but after Simone tells me of Claire’s arrest I feel I have to go and see where she was taken. I have to be brave enough to trace her terrifying journey through the streets to a leafy arrondissement on the west side of the city. I ask Thierry to come with me to the Avenue Foch, for moral support.
These days, the former Gestapo offices are highly respectable apartment buildings in one of the most sought-after areas of the city. But in 1943, the elegant road was known by the French as ‘The Street of Horrors’. We stand in silence outside the cream stone facade of the buildings. A pigeon flutters on to the grey slate roof of number eighty-four, crooning softly to itself as it nods its way along the guttering.
‘Are you okay?’ Thierry asks, turning to look at me.
It’s only then that I realise I’m crying. It takes me by surprise. I almost never cry. He must think I make a habit of it though, after our trip to Brittany.
He takes my hand and then pulls me to him, kissing my hair as I bury my face in the folds of his jacket and sob.
I cry for all the people who were brought here, for their terror and their pain.
I’m crying for Claire.
I cry for humanity, for a world which can so easily be broken.
I’m crying for my mother.
And – at last – I find I’m crying for myself.
1943
It was several days before the dyer would allow Mireille to return to the apartment above Delavigne Couture. He and his wife hid her in the cellar of a safe house a few streets away from the shop and, despite her protestations that she had to go back to the Rue Cardinale, he insisted that she stay put. ‘We have eyes and ears on the streets,’ he told her. ‘We know that your friends have been taken to the Avenue Foch for questioning. If they are forced to talk, the Gestapo will come back for you as well. You know the rules: the first twenty-four hours are critical. We have to get a warning out to the rest of the network. Even after that, it will be too dangerous for you to be in the apartment while they are still holding your friends. What if they come back to search again and they find you there?’