I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (27 page)

But in fact she'd collected an enormous amount of money. It was 1938, the war had not yet begun, and the adults had given freely. Adults were idiots, she realized gleefully. They weren't the masters she'd been led to believe. Even she, a child who'd spent her life hidden away, even she could manipulate them all.

—

T
HAT FALL
, she was sent away again. Mina declared Paris unsafe for Josée, even Nanterre, and sent her back to Chambon-sur-Lignon, this time with Mélanie in tow. Because Josée was now with her grandmother, she could not be reenrolled in the boarding school. Instead, she attended the village public school, and the two women rented a room in the home of the school's sole instructor. It was right before the Munich Agreement, Josée told
me, and the adults were afraid war was going to break out. Later, in my apartment, I returned to this with some confusion. The Munich Agreement led France to breathe a sigh of relief, believing war with Germany averted. It was signed on September 29, 1938. But Josée remained hidden for a full year, until the following summer.

“Well of course,” Josée said. “They weren't going to bring me back to Paris once school had begun.”

At the village school, the instructor assigned his students to bring in their favorite proverbs.

“You must always want what you can't avoid,” Josée offered when she was called upon.

“Where did you hear that?” the instructor asked.

“I invented it,” Josée said.

“And what does it mean?” the instructor asked.

“If you want it, then it can't hurt you,” Josée said. “We're all going to die, so we must decide to want our own deaths. If war comes, then we must want war. If someone slaps you, you tell yourself you like being slapped. That way you're always happy.”

The instructor looked at her with horror. At dinner that evening, he raised the incident with Mélanie. He was concerned that Josée might be suicidal. Josée squirmed, unsure what she had done wrong. Perhaps, she thought, she had not expressed herself clearly.

That summer, Josée and Mélanie returned once more to Paris. They were still there on September 3, when France declared war on Germany. Though the war wouldn't begin in earnest until May of the following year, fears ran high. Mina and Mélanie locked up the apartment, convinced they would return to find it looted and destroyed. The women took their jewelry. Josée took her Bébé Claude, her life-sized celluloid doll, with his brown velour underpants.

Eugène piled them all into his car. He had already moved his
other family. The streets were jammed with traffic. People ran between the cars. To nine-year-old Josée, it looked like some vehicles had entire homes strapped to the top. She had never seen adults so afraid. 

In the backseat, Mélanie explained to her that the Germans were approaching Paris with great long strides. They ate little children, she said. Sometimes Mélanie got confused and referred to the invaders as Prussians. Mélanie was born in 1875, and as a girl she had heard vivid stories of the Paris Commune, the city under siege. They might have to eat rats, she told Josée. The Prussians speared children on their spiked helmets, she said.

Eugène hit the brakes hard, and Mélanie fell on top of Josée and Bébé Claude. She weighed nearly two hundred pounds at that point, though later she would weigh far more. Her impact broke one of the doll's legs. Now Josée finally began to cry.
So this is it,
she thought;
these are the casualties of war.

—

E
UGÈNE LEFT
the three women in Bernay, in Normandy, where he had rented them a small room to share. Josée was enrolled in the local school. When she got into mischief or broke things, she was delighted to discover that the adults were too distracted to scold her. The Belgians came through, fleeing the German invasion. There were waves of them, bedraggled families carting all their possessions. She fetched them water, let them in to use the bathroom. She was again pleased to be useful.

And then there were no more Belgians. Her father reappeared with the car. The Germans were coming, he told them. He drove them to Brittany, to a town as far northwest as you could go before hitting the ocean, and left for Paris once more.

In Brittany, they lived on a farm. Here, Josée was disappointed to discover there was no discussion of school. The farmer's wife sent the children out to pick the potato beetles off the plants. The beetles were thick and yellow and clung to the undersides of the leaves. Josée hated the task, but she liked the end of the day, when they brought a full jar to the farmer's wife. She would set the beetles on fire and let the children watch them burn alive.

“Look,” she told them. “We're burning the Germans.”

One day, there was a commotion.

“Hide under the table!” Mina commanded. “The Germans have arrived.” Josée hid. She trembled with terror, ready to be eaten.

But instead she heard young men's voices raised in a chant—
ba bum bababa bum bababa bum
—and the rhythmic tramping of feet. She rushed to the window. Young men marched four abreast, their legs in perfect synchronicity. They wore sports shoes, not heavy boots, light shorts, not military uniforms. They were just young men getting some exercise.

“But they're very good-looking!” Josée exclaimed. She expected the adults to register the same impressed surprise and relief. But Mina's hand flew, smacked her hard across the face.

That's it,
Josée thought.
I'm through trying to understand.

They stayed on the farm perhaps a few months longer. It was there that Josée saw one of the most atrocious sights of the war. They killed a pig in front of her.

“The Germans?” I asked.

“No,” she said somberly. “The French.” In the town, there was a big celebration and a feast. Perhaps it was Bastille Day or perhaps it was a wedding. Josée didn't ask, because little girls didn't ask questions. They slit the pig's throat. The pig screamed. The blood ran everywhere. The pig screamed even with its throat slit.
It was a terrible sound. The adults were happy and drunk. They gathered the blood for sausages. Josée watched it pool on the ground by the nearby well, swirling pink into the muddy water.
This is war,
she thought to herself;
this is the blood and horror of war.

The following winter, the winter of 1940–1941, was one of the coldest on record. Eugène brought them back to Paris too early. Others were still trying to flee the capital. The road in the opposite direction, leading away from Paris, was jammed with cars. German planes swooped in low formations. At the staccato of automatic fire, everyone stopped their cars. They threw themselves into ditches and kept their heads down. Josée was afraid, but also she thought,
At last.
She kept her nose in the dirt and waited for the planes to pass. When they returned to their cars, bodies remained on the roadside.

—

T
HAT YEAR
, until early 1942, Josée and Mélanie lived with Mina in the apartment on Boulevard Inkermann. Eugène and his brother owned a company that sold animal feed. The business did well during the war, and the family was relatively comfortable. Paris was emptied of automobiles, and the remaining inhabitants, French and German alike, relied heavily on horses. But Eugène did a beautiful Resistance, Josée told me emphatically. He was a Freemason. He hid parachutists.

When I asked a sampling of young French people what their families had done during the war, two of them told me that their ancestors hid parachutists. The other three told me that they didn't know and changed the subject quickly.

At eleven years old, Josée began her seventh new school. She was eager to learn all she'd missed. In the evenings, Mina brought
her to ice-skating lessons, where Josée, thrilled by the attention, sped around the rink as her mother watched. She was tall and gangly as an asparagus then, all thin long limbs and knobby knees.

One afternoon, when there were no adults supervising, Josée convinced her only friend that they should trim their eyelashes short. She believed that trimming hair made it grow longer and she was impressed by her own brilliant plan. Oh, Josée told me, how she was punished when Mina discovered what she had done.

“Look,” she told me, leaning close across the brightly lit kitchen table of her apartment. “They never did grow back.” She fluttered her blue eyes down and I saw the short line of lashes that I had never noticed before. She stayed that way a moment, eyes downcast, waiting for me to speak. I felt a surge of extraordinary tenderness. I knew she was showing me a small flaw in the armor of her beauty. I traced the curve of her lashes with my gaze. Here was that gangly eleven-year-old girl; now I would be able to find her each time I looked.

Josée and I often spoke over long dinners and lunches, a series of meals that ran together in my mind into one long moment. She disliked speaking while eating, but I had difficulty with the formality of the times when we sat on her couch, my notebook a barrier between us. Each time I arrived at her home, the kitchen was fragrant and the food already prepared. One time she made me lamb chops that leaked red when you cut into them, another time soft-poached pears. One afternoon, I brought her a bag of mini-
financiers
from the boulangerie. When I returned a few days later, she told me proudly that she'd finished the pastries in a single afternoon. I'd taught her how to like sweets again, she told me.

“But I suppose that's what old age is, in the end,” she said. “It's a return to the simplicity of childhood.”

—

J
OSÉE
'
S BRIEF PERIOD
of normalcy was short-lived. In February 1942, another evening of intense turmoil descended, this time within the confines of their home. After a fiery argument, Eugène had locked them into the apartment. Mina threw their clothes into suitcases and threw the suitcases out the window in a fury.

“He locked you
in
?” I asked. “What kind of apartment door can't be opened from the inside?”

“I don't know,” Josée said. “I didn't ask questions. It wasn't like you here with your tape recorder, bombarding me.”

Mina called the upstairs neighbor, who managed to break open the door. Mina fled, Josée and Mélanie in tow. She brought them to a small dark apartment with ugly moth-infested furniture, a twenty-five-minute walk away. A handsome Italian man awaited them there. Mina fell into his arms. He introduced himself to Josée as Beppo, but his face was already familiar. Josée remembered him from the edge of the ice at the skating lessons. She remembered it all now: his face next to her mother's, her mother's coquettish laughter as Josée whirled round and round.

“Your father wants to take you away from me,” Mina told Josée. “I need to hide you.” Josée packed her bags and moved yet again. She went with Mélanie to Viarmes, a sleepy suburb in the north of France. There was no school because Josée could not risk being found. They lived in a hotel with room and board. There was nothing to do. Mélanie warned her not to speak to the other children. Her father was searching for her all over France, she said. Anybody might be a spy. Josée's days dragged on in endless boredom. On Saturdays, the hotel doubled as the town cinema.
Those afternoons were the only bright moments of these long months, the reels of film spinning her into places far away.

When Josée and Mélanie returned to Paris that summer, Beppo and Mina had rented an opulent apartment on the Rue du Conseiller Collignon, not far from the Place du Trocadero, with its palace and grand fountain. This was in Paris's wealthy sixteenth arrondissement, framed on the west by lush greenery of the Bois-de-Boulogne. High-ranking government officials lived there, alongside France's old money.

The new apartment had a small garden out front where Mina could tend the roses. Finally, Josée belonged to something that resembled a family. There was a papa who came home each evening, a mother who was there in the mornings. There was a room for Mélanie and one for Josée. Beppo gently gave his new mother-in-law lessons. He taught her how to hold herself at the table, how to speak to the help. Still, Mélanie suffered terrible indigestion that year, her stomach unaccustomed to so much rich food.

“And you?” I asked my grandmother. “How did you react?” But nothing surprised young Josée. She took what came to her in life, accepting the ups with the same resilience as the downs. “I wanted to taste all the sauces,” she told me. Mina and the chauffeur took her out to the shops in a horse-drawn carriage. They dressed her head to toe in Hermès and Lanvin. Beppo, eager to please, hired a Russian governess who brought Josée to near grade level over the summer. He taught her some Italian. He gave her pocket money in exchange for her good grades, which had never been looked at so attentively. Still, Josée insisted on walking to school. It wouldn't be well received by her classmates, she said, the chauffeurs and fancy cars.

On Thursdays, Josée visited her father. His secretary (who was also his new mistress) let Josée into his office through the ground-floor window. Josée waited patiently while Eugène sorted his mail. He took Josée to lunch in a nearby restaurant. He took from his pockets a wrapped parcel and slipped it to her under the table. It was white bread. Bread in Paris in those days was black, and white flour was very difficult to come by.

Eugène had shaved his head—in despair, he told Josée. “How could your mother leave me?” he wanted to know. “After everything I've done for her.”

“But wasn't your father trying to steal you back?” I asked. “How could you go see him at lunch?”

“Oh, I think he and my mother came to some understanding—she told him I was living with her, enrolled in school, and shouldn't be uprooted again,” she told me. But a few minutes later, she said, “My mother and my father never talked in those years.” And then added, as I opened my mouth to ask, “except, of course, to come to that agreement I just told you about.”