by Sharon Maas
Marie-Claire looked around for a chair and saw that the two that in M. Tailler’s time were habitually in front of the desk were now shoved against the back wall. She gestured to them as if to ask permission to fetch one of them, and Kurtz gave her what she could only interpret as a nod of impatience. She fetched a chair, placed it before the desk with her back to the door and sat down, all of this watched closely by Kurtz.
‘So, Fräulein Gauthier, I have already made my enquiries and have been informed that you are not only a competent secretary, you are the daughter of one of the most prominent winegrowers in the region. Is that correct?’
‘Yes, sir. My mother owns the vineyard Château Gauthier-Laroche. It produces one of the best wines of the area.’
‘Please only reply to the questions asked. If I need further information, I will request it.’
‘Very well, Herr Kreisleiter.’
‘Well, your credentials seem to be in order, though of course there will be some necessary security checks you will be subjected to, as with all French employees in German administration units. Your work here will be absolutely confidential. That is the first thing you must know. Nothing may be removed from this building, and you will be searched by a German guard at the end of each workday. I have already decided that you will be my own personal assistant, which carries with it an increased level of confidentiality. You may not discuss your work here with anyone, not even your own mother. Do you understand this?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, Herr Kreisleiter.’
‘I understand that your mother’s chateau is somewhere in the region of Ribeauvillé? How do you get to work each day?’
‘I cycle to Ribeauvillé, Herr Kreisleiter, and I take the bus to Colmar from there.’
‘I understand that winters here can be quite severe – how do you get to work when there is heavy snowfall?’
‘I-I was not working in Colmar yet last winter, but my mother has said that in the winter months I can stay in town and live with my great-aunt.’
He nodded. ‘Very good. In fact, it would be better if you moved in there already – immediately. I insist on absolute punctuality, and this business with bicycle and bus – it’s too unreliable. You can return home for Saturdays and Sundays, if you so wish. Now, the next subject I need to discuss with you is that of your name. It must be changed. I believe you have already been made aware of this.’
Marie-Claire gulped. ‘Yes. I have been told this.’
‘And have you as yet decided on your new German name? I believe Herr Grötzinger left our booklet of approved names at your home? We do, if possible, allow Alsatian citizens to choose their own name, and only interfere with duplicates. Have you yet selected a name?’
‘No, Herr Kreisleiter. I haven’t seen the booklet.’
He bent over to retrieve the leather briefcase from the floor next to his chair. Holding it on his knee, he groped around within it until he found what he was looking for. He held up a thin booklet.
‘Here it is. Let’s make it simple: a German female name beginning with M. There are many of them: Maria, Manuela, Margarethe, Martina… pick one.’
‘I-I don’t know, I…’
‘We haven’t got time to waste; if you can’t decide I’ll do so for you. Margarethe: my sister’s name. Now you need a surname, but I expect your mother will have to choose that for the whole family. Something beginning with G. I’ll give you a day to speak to her and tomorrow I expect you to register your full new name first thing in the morning. So that’s settled. Now, let’s move on to other matters. That’s your desk.’
He pointed to a much smaller desk adjacent to his own. On a corner of it stood a typewriter, now protected by a dust cover. When this was the mayor’s office, an older woman, Mademoiselle Leprince, had worked at that desk, taking down shorthand, typing out letters here sometimes but more often in the typing room with the other girls. Marie-Claire had seen Mademoiselle Leprince walk out of the Mairie during the earlier culling of staff – even though her German was perfect. Once again, she felt shame; she had practically volunteered to work here: a betrayal of her family, her country. She was a traitor.
Though there were some Alsatians who would welcome the invasion. Despised by Margaux and almost everyone she knew, these were the Allemani – descendants from an ancient tribe of ethnic Germans, still proud of that heritage. And wasn’t it true that there were people, older people, mostly, who had shrugged their shoulders at the German annexation of Alsace? ‘They come and they go, the Germans,’ said these older ones. ‘sometimes we are French, sometimes we are German. But always, we are Alsace. What difference does it make, as long as we can live our lives in peace.’ Secretly – she would never reveal these treasonous thoughts to Margaux, and even less so to Jacques – Marie-Claire was one of them.
Marie-Claire didn’t have a political bone in her body and had not really kept up with developments. She knew, of course, that Hitler was the villain in this story – everyone said so – but she never listened to his speeches over the wireless and even less did she listen to her own mother’s tirades against the Führer and the occupation of Alsace. She knew it was all bad in a general sense; war was always bad, and there was a war on; but war had not yet arrived at their door, and hopefully never would. There was no artillery on her doorstep, no bombs falling, and nobody she knew had been killed or driven from their home. It had all been so far away. Until today.
Marie-Claire was not a rebel, not an activist. Her main source of news was her mother, but Marie-Claire wasn’t interested in her mother’s opinion on politics, or on anything for that matter; she was more likely to take an oppositional stance to anything her mother said.
If Marie-Claire was at all anti-Nazi, it was because of two people. One was her beloved father, who for years had warned against the Nazis and predicted war, predicted that Germany was a formidable enemy and that when – not if – they came, France would face great peril. Her father was decidedly anti-Nazi.
The other person was… Jacques. She couldn’t even think of Jacques without a sense of hollowness, a sense of the emptiness and futility of her life here in the backwoods of France. If only… but Jacques hardly took note of her existence. She had once tried to remedy this. She could not think of this one attempt to win him without acute embarrassment.
They had both been sixteen at the time; as was often the case, Jacques was staying at the chateau after a wonderful September day of harvesting. There had been a party; wine flowing; song and dance and flirting and fun well into the night. But Jacques wasn’t the dance-and-flirting kind of boy. He had slipped away without anyone noticing – except her. Jacques had always had his own room in the chateau; he came and went as he pleased, and Margaux treated him as a third son. She, Marie-Claire, was in a state of heightened excitement; Margaux had turned a blind eye, for once, to her adult friends when Marie-Claire, bright-eyed and charming, had seduced them into ‘just a little sip’! Several little sips had probably added up to a full glass, and Marie-Claire felt not only more charming and beautiful than ever, she also felt adventurous, daring – and seductive.
She edged up behind Margaux – deep in conversation with Jacques’ father, Maxence – placed her hand on the wine-glass-holding arm, leaned in and whispered in her ear, ‘Maman, I’m tired. I’m going up to bed.’
‘D’accord!’ replied Margaux. ‘A bit too much to drink, I suspect. Drink a glass of water before you go upstairs. Bon nuit, mon petit choux.’ Back then, she and Margaux had had a fairly amicable relationship. Papa was often at home, and Paris already burned as a beckoning light in her heart. The pestering of her mother to actually move there had not yet started.
Instead of a glass of water, Marie-Claire had slipped into the kitchen and helped herself to a glass of Riesling from an open bottle standing among the clutter on the sideboard. For courage.
She’d gone up to her bedroom, taken off all her clothes and slipped into a silk dressing gown her father had given her for her last birthday –
there was a nightie to match, but Marie-Claire didn’t need a nightie for tonight’s adventure. She wrapped the soft folds of the dressing gown around her, tied its waist belt into a bow, slipped out of the door and padded, barefoot, to Jacques’ room. She knocked on the door and without waiting for an answer, opened it and entered.
The room was dark except for a circle of diminishing light at the head of the bed; Jacques lay there, propped up on a few pillows, reading. He looked up, startled.
‘Marie-Claire! What are you doing here?’
She giggled; her hand reached for the switch and light flooded the room. She stepped forward. ‘What do you think, Jacques! Visiting you, of course!’
With one flowing move she pulled at the bow at her waistband and lowered both her arms (she had practised in her room: she knew what would happen), turning her body in a slow, dramatic pirouette. The dressing gown slid in soft billowing folds to the floor, like a rippled flow of water, forming a silken pool around her feet from which Marie-Claire stood in a silent, sultry glory, a water nymph, perhaps, one foot slightly in front of the other, knee bent, hip slanted, hands holding her luxurious mane of golden-blond hair aloft. She narrowed her eyes, opened her lips slightly and gazed at Jacques with a look that left no questions open.
‘Marie-Claire!’ Jacques’ angry shout cracked the spell. He leapt from the bed pulling a sheet behind him, wrapped it around her.
‘You silly, silly girl! What on earth! Are you drunk?’
Marie-Claire blubbered, ‘Jacques, you don’t understand! I want to… Jacques, I love you! Don’t you understand! I always loved you! I wanted you to-to know, to see… I-I…’
And she began to cry, to sob. Jacques held her around her waist and led her to the bed, holding the sheet in place around her shoulders. He turned her around and pulled her down to sit, and sat down next to her, his arm still around her waist. With his other hand he gently dabbed at her tears with a corner of the sheet. His anger had left him; now he spoke in gentle, soothing tones.
‘Marie-Claire, don’t cry. It’s all right. You had too much to drink, didn’t you – I saw you, you know! It’s all a big mistake, this. It’s all right, don’t worry.’
‘It isn’t a mistake!’ she sobbed. ‘I just want you to see me, to notice me! You don’t even know I exist! And I love you, I always loved you, and – and you’re a man, and everyone says I’m so beautiful, but you don’t even notice, you don’t even see me at all, and I thought, I thought…’
Jacques stroked the back of her head.
‘Oh, Marie-Claire. Of course I see you, of course I love you! I’ve known you all my life; how could I not love you! But that’s the thing, you see – you’re like my sister. I can’t think of you in any other way, and you need to see me as a brother as well. It wouldn’t be right, Marie-Claire, what you’re proposing. I think you mistake the love you feel for me. You think it’s romance, but it isn’t, it’s just sisterly love, and it’s fine that way, and it wouldn’t be right to – to change that. We’re brother and sister, don’t you see. We’re all brothers and sisters together, you and me and Victoire and Juliette and Leon and Lucien. We all grew up together, one family—’
‘But we’re not! We’re not even related and I’ve always, always loved you and I always vowed I’d marry you and now it’s all over and – and I hate myself and I feel like a stupid idiot now and it’s so embarrassing!’
‘You’re a little bit tipsy, Marie-Claire, and everyone does silly things when they drink too much – it’s why I never drink more than a glass or two. No need to feel embarrassed. I promise I’ll have forgotten it all by tomorrow and so will you.’
‘I’ll never forget it, never! I can’t believe you rejected me! I thought—’
‘Shhh, Marie-Claire. You thought wrong, that’s all. Tomorrow you’ll be a bit hungover and you won’t remember a thing.’
But she had remembered. The embarrassment was seared into her memory, a mishap she’d never forget. She pushed it away but every now and again she’d recall the burning mortification of that rejection; it was a pivotal moment in her life. She’d never recover. From that day she had avoided Jacques’ company; leaving a room as soon as he entered, and never saying more than a few formal words of greeting or farewell, never meeting his eyes, not even at family dinners around Margaux’s table.
But Jacques had obviously forgotten. He didn’t even seem to notice or to care that she avoided him; at those family dinners he was irritatingly casual, smiling when he greeted her without ever dropping a hint that it was all awkward and damaged between them. He was even less aware of her now than ever before; all he ever spoke of was the Resistance to the Nazis, and she was little more than a footnote. It was that memory, that embarrassment, that humiliating rejection that pushed her all the more towards Paris. It was Jacques she had to forget, Jacques and that most ridiculous, most humiliating moment.
Paris was the very antithesis of Jacques; Paris was the antidote to Jacques. Paris was couture and culture; Jacques was mountains and forests. Never the two would meet. Yet she knew: in a heartbeat she would turn from Paris and live with Jacques in some mountain hut in the Vosges forests.
If he would have her. But he wouldn’t. And so only Paris remained: the cure.
Jacques hated the Nazis, and if she were Jacques’ woman, Jacques’ wife, she’d certainly hate them too; but now all she could feel was the embarrassment at having accepted this plum job with the enemy. And yet; and yet. New thoughts nibbled at that vague shame, swirled in her head, an idea she’d never before entertained. Personal assistant to the Kreisleiter… what a step up the ladder! From Colmar to Paris wasn’t that big a leap. If she could do well here, perhaps, just perhaps – a transfer, one day?
But even to think such ambitious thoughts seemed selfish, traitorous – what would Jacques think? He’d be horrified. No wonder he rejected her. She was not worthy of him, not noble enough… and one word from him, one sign that he wanted her, and all this would be as nothing. Paris would be nothing. But such a word, such a sign, was an impossible dream. Better to just take the job.
‘This is as of now my office,’ said the Kreisleiter now, jolting her away from her self-recriminations. ‘Herr Grötzinger will be the new Oberbürgermeister, district mayor, and he will be given a smaller office across the hallway. You may not use this office on your own. Once a week, perhaps more often, I shall be here and I will use this office, and employ you as my secretary for the letters I’ll dictate, translating them into French where necessary. You may not use this typewriter – there are enough machines in the communal typists’ room. I’ll be away a lot of the time as I’ll be inspecting conditions and upholding laws all over the region. When I am in the office you’ll be taking shorthand notes of letters I’ll dictate to you, or minutes of meetings, and typing up reports in the general office with the other girls. Do you understand?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, Herr Kreisleiter.’
‘Right now, I want you to leave; there’s work to be done. Your first job will be to make a list of all the bilingual secretaries waiting to be interviewed. Take the name booklet and make sure they choose their German names by the end of the morning, and that those names are recorded by the registrar. This office has to set an example.
‘I’d like a new list with the new names as soon as possible. By then I should have finished the interviews – I doubt they will last long, I only want to test the level of German fluency, and in addition make my own subjective assessment of each girl. Obviously, I require absolute reliability, absolute confidentiality. You will be going through a security check later today, as well as all the staff provisionally employed. Make sure all the staff members know of this. I can’t have gossips working here – this is serious work, and German efficiency is to replace the French lackadaisical attitude that I understand has been the order of the day until now. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Herr Kreisleiter. I understand.’
‘Good. Then go.’
Eleven
She was right: Maman was furious. ‘Nobody in my family works for the Nazis! Have you no shame, girl? No honour?’
‘Maman, I had no choice! I had to!’
Yet she blushed as she said those words, remembering how she had, indeed, made a show of her qualifications. But Maman couldn’t know that. Unless… she’d find out. Of course she would. Maman knew everyone and at least two of the women who had walked out even though they were bilingual were her friends. They’d tell her. The only way for Marie-Claire to retain a smidgen of pride now was in defiance.
‘Well, at least I still have a job now, unlike half the other secretaries! A good job at that!’
‘I refuse to allow it. You’re still underage; you need my permission to get a job.’
‘Maman, I’ll be twenty-one in four months’ time! It’s hardly worth it, to forbid me!’
‘In four months’ time they won’t need you any more. You think you’re so important that they’ll wait? For you? Ha!’ Margaux chuckled wryly and shook her head in disdain, which annoyed Marie-Claire all the more.
Victoire, sitting next to her at the dinner table, placed a placatory hand on her mother’s wrist.
‘Maman – please!’ she whispered. It was always Victoire’s role to calm the stormy waters between her sister and her mother, and it was always her mother who needed a restraining hand. Margaux’s passions tended to run away with her; she could be the most wonderful, generous, kindest person in the world but once her ire was provoked, she would say things that could never be unsaid. Especially where Marie-Claire was concerned. Now, she shook away Victoire’s hand and was about to launch into a new tirade, but Marie-Claire had already sprung to her own defence, shouting the words, red in the face, her eyes blazing with anger.
‘They want me, Maman, because I’m good, and you really don’t want to anger the Nazis, you know! You don’t have to collaborate—’