Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  But the gendarme was not there. When had he been? An hour ago? A day? Had he been yet? Had he come?

  ‘A priest . . . I want a priest.’

  A passing nurse looked at him in surprise. ‘A rabbi, don’t you mean?’

  A minute later, or perhaps two hours, a doctor came to his bed. ‘Those on the Reserve list have to go to the other corner of the courtyard. Block One. Staircase Two. We need your bed.’

  The man helped Levade to the door, then turned back into the infirmary.

  Outside, Levade leaned against the side of the building, beneath the shallow roof. It was dark.

  He knelt down on the ground, then laid his cheek against the cold stone. Some stirring of childhood memory came to him at the touch of it; some recollection of the crawling world of the infant who is intimate with floors and surfaces.

  He closed his eyes to spare his mind the images of the night and felt time rushing up suddenly in him. Once more he was at a thin altitude of years; but as the final wave built up, it was not with the memory of war, not with thoughts of women he had loved, not with the touch of the God he had worshipped or the pained awareness of the nights when dreams had fled from him.

  It came in sounds of elsewhere, of other people’s lives. He heard a baby cry, he heard the sound of a bird; there was a motor lorry backfiring in the quiet street and then a woman’s voice; he heard a jangling bell.

  Then all the years rose up and swallowed him in one rapid, sweet unravelling.

  5

  ‘THIS IS GIANLUCA SORACCI . Peter Gregory.’ Nancy made the introduction and the two men shook hands.

  ‘I’m sorry it take me so long,’ said Soracci in English. ‘Is difficult. I have much work to do.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Gregory. ‘I understand.’

  ‘What’s the plan, Gianluca?’ said Nancy.

  ‘First I have a cigarette.’ Soracci took an onyx lighter from Nancy’s table and lit up shakily. After a deep inhalation he sat down and smiled. He was a delicate man, with small hands and feet, brown, candid eyes and a slight plumpness round the belt.

  ‘Are you taking him in the felucca?’ said Nancy.

  ‘No, no, we do different. I take him to Italy. We go to Genoa. Then he take a ship to North Africa. Is easy.’

  ‘Any particular part of North Africa?’ said Gregory.

  ‘We see. I think soon you go where you like. Anywhere is yours. The Germans soon finished.’

  ‘Rommel?’

  ‘Si.’ Soracci nodded quickly and pulled a shred of tobacco from his lower lip.

  ‘Isn’t it going to be dangerous for an Englishman in Italy, getting over the border and so on?’

  ‘No. I fix it. I know many people. Soon all Italy is on your side. You see.’

  ‘I think he’s right,’ said Nancy. ‘There’s no enthusiasm for the Germans. Especially now they’re losing.’

  ‘What kind of boat?’ said Gregory.

  ‘A big boat. Goes quick.’ Soracci laughed. ‘Then you see your old friends. The boys in blue. They take you home.’

  ‘That sounds good.’

  ‘You can trust Gianluca,’ said Nancy. ‘He knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘All right,’ said Gregory. ‘When do we leave?’

  ‘We leave tomorrow. I come for you in the morning. I don’t know how long you wait in Genoa, but not long I think. Is the best way.’

  They shook hands, and Soracci disappeared.

  There was a silence after he had gone. Nancy coughed and began to speak in an artificial way, as though talking to a schoolboy. ‘The Italians have been useful in France,’ she said. ‘They’ve stopped Vichy sending all the Jews from east of the Rhône up for deportation.’

  She began to tidy the living room in a distracted way. As she was making a pile of some newspapers, she turned to Gregory and said abruptly, ‘Now why don’t you go and pack your case?’

  ‘I don’t have a case, Nancy.’

  ‘I’ll lend you one.’

  ‘When’ll I give it back?’

  ‘When I come and see you in London. After the war.’

  ‘Do you promise you’ll come?’

  ‘What are war-time promises?’

  ‘It would mean a lot to me.’

  ‘Go and pack,’ said Nancy softly. ‘Just go and pack.’

  All day Charlotte fretted about her gendarme and whether he would be able to repeat her message to Levade. With nothing to do to pass the time, she walked round the perimeter of the camp. A narrow road ran along the eastern flank of the building, where there was a further line of barbed wire. In the north-eastern corner there was a small entry into the camp, not large enough for a vehicle, guarded by a gendarme. The windows in the long eastern side were painted over blue, and the inhabitants behind them were invisible.

  For all that she tried to imagine the hardships inside, the place and the surrounding area retained an extraordinarily normal atmosphere. This suburb was not a wealthy one, but people came and went along the street with shopping bags; bicycles rang their bells and dogs barked as they sniffed along the pavement. Life went on, and no one seemed concerned.

  In the afternoon, Charlotte went back to her room and looked through the binoculars. Between roll calls, the courtyard was almost deserted. Sometimes she could see inmates slinking round against the inner wall, presumably on their way to work in the kitchens or the repair shops.

  It was dark when the evening roll call began, and she could not make out the faces of the multitude who grudgingly assembled in the cold air. She went downstairs to find something to eat. While she was sitting at a table by the door, her gendarme came in.

  There were about a dozen other people in the café: some workers on their way home, and four or five people staying upstairs, hoping for news of their families. Charlotte said nothing to the gendarme, but allowed him time to have a drink at the bar. He caught her eye as he looked round the room and she walked slowly past him, up the stairs, and waited on the landing. The sound of his boots was not long in coming, and he gestured with his head down the corridor towards the little sitting room.

  Charlotte went softly after him and closed the door behind her.

  ‘Did you find him?’

  The gendarme nodded. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘This evening.’

  ‘Did you give him the message?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was he all right when you told him? Did he understand?’

  The gendarme had taken off his cap and was moving it slowly round in his hands. He licked his lips and swallowed. ‘Yes. He understood.’

  ‘And did he have a message for me?’

  The gendarme looked down at his boots. There was a soft silence in the room. Then he nodded violently, twice. ‘He said, “Thank you.”’

  ‘I see.’ Charlotte breathed in. ‘And thank you, Monsieur. Thank you for—’

  But the gendarme brushed past her in his hurry to be gone. Charlotte heard him thundering down the stairs. She sat down suddenly on the edge of an armchair.

  André Duguay could not see out of the windows of the bus as it drew into the courtyard; it was packed with children and their suitcases and bundles of belongings. He was jolted back and forth between Jacob and a girl of about the same age, whom the motion of the bus had made vomit on the floor.

  When the doors were finally opened, the smaller ones were helped down off the platform by gendarmes. André stood blinking in the large cindered courtyard of Drancy, Jacob’s hand clenched in his.

  Some women were hovering at the edge of the group of children, and André instinctively went towards one of them. She did not look like his mother: she was fatter, and she spoke with a strange accent.

  ‘My God, the smell. Where have you come from?’

  André shrugged. In the jostling of people he heard the question repeated and the word ‘Compiègne.’ Was that where he and Jacob had been? It had been a filthy place.

  Holding Jacob, he went
with a group of children, following two women down the courtyard. They were in a room where they were made to take their clothes off. André had been able to keep himself clean, but Jacob’s shorts were caked with excrement. The women held their hands across their faces as they tried to clean the children in the showers. Some of them were covered with sores where the acid of their waste had eaten into their skin. Other women tried to wash the clothes, while the children were pushed into another room where two or three soaking cloths were used as towels. One woman who was drying them wept at their pitiful state, but another one looked at her sternly. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, patting André’s bare chest, ‘you’re going to find your parents again.’

  A doctor, who painted purple liquid on their sores before their damp clothes were returned to them, looked at her with a quizzical stare. She shrugged and pouted, as though to say, What else can I tell them?

  André was in another building. A gendarme was asking his name. He wrote it on a wooden tag and hung it round André’s neck. Some of the children did not know what they were called. The girl behind André, a child of about three, stared up, uncomprehending, into the big face of the gendarme. Some of the children swapped name tags.

  Out in the courtyard again, André stood unsure of what to do. He saw some other children following a grown-up man with a white band round his arm, and assumed he might be someone in authority. He pulled Jacob along with him.

  They entered a staircase, but the steps were too high for some of the smaller children, who were carried by their brothers and sisters, panting and heaving to the floor above. Here, on the bare concrete landing, another man told them to keep climbing. Dragging themselves and their squalling burdens, they came to the third floor where they were shown into an empty room.

  André and the other children stood beneath the single, blue light bulb for some time, uncertainly, before they eventually sat down on the mattresses that were soaked in the filth of previous children. A bucket was placed at the doorway for those too small to make the long climb down to the courtyard, but it soon overflowed.

  André, who never remembered either to take his bag of books and shoes to school in Lavaurette or to bring it home at night, had left his suitcase on the bus.

  ‘I must go and find it,’ he said. ‘It’s Madame Cariteau’s case, the one we did tobogganing with. She’ll be cross if we lose it.’ Anne-Marie had delivered the suitcase to Bernard, the gendarme, who had passed it to them through the window of the departing train at Lavaurette. André had been delighted.

  Outside again, he went over to where the bus was now leaving the compound. Three more buses had been and gone in the meantime, and André found a number of children of his age wandering among the hundreds of forgotten bundles and bags, looking for some identifying mark. One boy sat cross-legged on the cinders, his head between his knees. André noticed the scabs and sores on the back of his hands, which were clamped round his neck. The boy appeared to be immobilised; it was as though he had found the point beyond which he could not go. André saw the fair hairs on his neck, matted together with filth.

  André wanted Madame Cariteau’s case with a fierce desire. There was a sweater for Jacob, who was shivering after his shower, and, more than this, there were the tin soldiers and the adjustable spanner. Suddenly, he caught sight of the brass locks and the name CARITEAU on a case half-hidden beneath a pile of other bags and he pulled it out. Bumping it across the courtyard with both hands on the grip, he found he had forgotten which was his staircase: there were so many similar doors on the ground floor, each of them opening on to identical stone steps.

  With great politeness he asked for the help of a man who seemed to be directing traffic and who reminded him a little of his father. ‘Monsieur, I’ve lost my brother. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten which room he’s in and I’m worried he may be afraid without me. He doesn’t like the dark.’

  André hoped God would forgive him this lie; it was he who was so scared of the night, not Jacob, who was always willing to go into a darkened room on any errand André asked him.

  The man smiled. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll find him.’ He took André’s hand.

  ‘Are you a policeman?’

  ‘Good God, no.’ The man laughed. ‘I’m in charge of this staircase. My name’s Hartmann. You won’t remember that, will you? It doesn’t matter. I can see what your name is from your tag.’

  Up and down the dim stairwells the kindly man led André until they found the room where Jacob was lying, huddled on a mattress. He gave a little cry when André came across the room, stood up and kissed him, with terrible tenderness, on the face.

  There was a solid wailing in the room as though the children’s nerve had given way in a collective wave of despair. The older ones could no longer be of comfort to the younger, and even the women who tried to help them were in tears. Jacob clutched André, his arms round his neck like a monkey clinging to its mother, and André held on tight for his own sake too.

  A pail of cabbage soup came up in the evening, and the children clustered round with what cups they had found or been given. One of the women warned them that it would make their diarrhoea worse, but they drank it and shared it out among themselves with ravening hands.

  Later André saw the kind man from the courtyard, who came back into the room with a second man in whose concerned expression even André could see exhaustion. He went from one soaked mattress to another, tapping the chests of the children with his long fingers, feeling their wrists, and laying his hand across their foreheads. Some of them seemed better for his touch.

  ‘Dysentery,’ said Levi to Hartmann when he had finished his futile round. ‘Where did they come from?’

  ‘Some came from the camp in Compiègne and some from a children’s home in Louveciennes.’

  ‘We’ve never really got rid of the dysentery here, anyway,’ said Levi. ‘Some of these children should be in the infirmary, but there isn’t any room.’

  Hartmann walked with him to the end of the corridor. ‘I don’t think it matters very much,’ he said. ‘I doubt whether they’ll be here more than two days.’

  They heard the scream of a whistle signalling that the lights should be turned out. In their fouled bed, André and Jacob heard it too.

  ‘It’s very dark,’ said André, as the glow of the blue bulb was extinguished.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Jacob, close in his arms. ‘I’m not frightened of the dark.’

  Through her binoculars Charlotte watched the morning roll call. Now that the children she had seen arrive the day before were standing still in rows, she had a chance to scan their faces.

  Towards the back she could see two small boys she thought she recognised. The distance was too great for her to be certain, but there was something about the way the elder one’s hair stood on end, something, too, about the pliant attitude of the smaller one, his hand lightly resting on his brother’s forearm.

  She did not know what she could do to help them. Perhaps she could send some words of encouragement. What she wanted to do was take them in her arms and kiss them as a mother might. She no longer had enough money left to bribe the gendarme; the only thing she could think to do was to walk along the outside of the camp to where she had seen the second, smaller entry, and try to persuade someone to bring the boys over to her.

  Later in the morning, she walked up the street to the north-east corner of the camp. A gendarme was standing guard over the entrance; it was not promising. Throughout the day, Charlotte watched the narrow gateway in the hope that it would for a moment be unguarded. All that happened was that, in the afternoon, a second gendarme came and smoked a cigarette with the first before taking over his position. Charlotte looked up to the long lines of blue-painted windows in the eastern side of the building. If one should open just a crack she might be able to shout up a message.

  The afternoon turned to early darkness. Charlotte felt hungry, and stupefied by the anxious tedium of her wait. It was no good. She had done what sh
e first came to do: she had enabled Levade to die in peace of mind. The comforting of André and Jacob was a secondary consideration, and the truth was that a brief meeting with her would make very little difference. What they wanted was their mother, and nothing Charlotte could do would affect whether or not that joy would ever come to them again.

  With the greatest reluctance, she would have to leave them. All her maternal feelings cried out against it; she hated the thought that she of all people should be abandoning the boys. It troubled her that she had been unable to finish her self-imposed task, but she saw that there was nothing more that she could do for them. After one more night in the café she would return to Paris.

  The evening before a transport was the time Hartmann feared. An atmosphere of nervous dread seeped through the bare concrete and straw mattresses of Drancy. These people, driven and starved, were made to contemplate a new uncertainty: while few of them believed the foul gossip of gas and crematoria, none of them could look with equanimity on their departure.

  Word came to Hartmann in his room that an extra wagon had been added to the train. In view of the poor condition of the new arrivals, it was suggested by the French police authorities that the wagon should be filled with children. The Jewish committee had protested that many of the children were French nationals, and that there were Poles and Rumanians to spare, but in the random logic of the concentration camp the children were selected. The specificity of the typed lists, with their details of family names and dates of birth, concealed the haphazard nature of the selection, but once the carbon copies rolled off the platen the list was unalterable.

  Hartmann went up the stone treads of his staircase with aching steps. Going into the room at all was hard enough, with its faecal stench and background of permanent wailing. He would have to tell them that they were going to rejoin their parents; such a lie was not only forgivable, it was obligatory if they were to get through the next few hours.

  He carried a sheet of paper in his hand.

  André looked up from his bed. He was pleased to see the man who looked like his father. This was what they needed – someone from the old days, someone from before the world went wrong, a man with a handsome face and deep voice who would take them back to their house and let their lives start up again.