Monsieur le Commandant (15 page)

Laugnac picked up my son.

‘Follow us. We’re going for a stroll in the woods.’

André could barely walk.

‘Let me write a letter to my parents first,’ he begged. ‘Please … And I also want to say goodbye to my little sister Germaine …’

I heard the giant cackle.

‘With those hands? You couldn’t even draw a cross.’

André’s fingers were all twisted and crooked. I offered to write the letter for him, at his dictation. I promised to bring it to
Fresne-l
’Archevêque myself, if I were allowed.

‘No time,’ Laugnac decreed. ‘We have to take care of these two, call for reinforcements, and head over to the farm to nab those Brits. I’ll go and see your mother. I’ll tell her myself that you ratted on everyone and then died like a dog.’

‘Bastard,’ I shouted.

He smiled.

‘It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Commandant Husson.’

Detective Cuvelier grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me back.

The others left the room. I heard a door slam downstairs, then the car doors, and the two vehicles sped away.

Simon and the Club returned to find me slumped in the armchair, under the watchful eye of the detective.

The three men lit cigarettes, sat on the chairs, which were still spattered with blood, and laid out their demands.

The plan had changed since the last time. It was no longer a matter of 5,000 a month. I now had ten days to gather and deliver a single payment of 250,000 francs. That is no small sum, Monsieur le Commandant, and I did not have it. But these crooks had done their homework. As I have mentioned, my marriage to Marguerite had brought me two buildings in Paris. By mortgaging one I could quickly borrow what I needed, and later, if necessary, repay the bank by selling the other. My thieving blackmailers knew it, and so did I.

If I refused to pay, they would fetch Ilse from Rue Richer, bring her to the house of sorrows in Fleury-sur-Andelle, and leave her with Martin Laugnac and his men. Who would be very happy to have a Jewess to play with, according to the Club. Nailing people to beams is one of their favourite pastimes. These police auxiliaries trawl the province picking up Resistance or black-market suspects in their cars. They sometimes pass themselves off as dissidents, entrapping farmers or tradesmen with Resistance sympathies. Those who they do not kill on the spot in a hail of bullets they bring to the sort of place I had been taken to. Their bodies, buried in remote forests or flung down the deepest wells, are never found.

I accepted their conditions. What choice did I have?

These men had me.

I did not know whether Cuvelier had arranged all this without Sadorski’s knowledge. It was very likely – in which case, he intended to slip him his share of the 5,000 every month and claim he had received it from me.

What difference did it make? No matter how you looked at it, I was trapped.

Here I must digress a moment.

No one believed more than I did, and still do, Monsieur le Commandant, in the importance and the future of Collaboration between our two peoples. How could I write you such a letter, in confidential friendship, if I did not?

I deeply respect the warrior’s uniform you wear. You and I are of the same rank, for that matter. Like my compatriots, it pains me to see that uniform, the uniform of the German Army, sullied by acts that you yourself would never commit, but which others who are not German undertake by exploiting and abusing the considerable authority that you undoubtedly erred in conferring upon them. Such men, who just nights ago I heard identify themselves to your Feldgendarmes as agents of the German secret police, deserve no other title but
thieves, extortionists, murderers
…

If these flocks of gallows birds are allowed to run wild in our country with impunity, the Collaboration, that great endeavour, may well be compromised in my province and elsewhere. The integration of France into Europe must be more than an empty promise, a rhetorical flourish. It must be a tangible reality, accessible to all. Alongside its political and technical transformation, French society must be transformed
morally
. Your Ambassador, His Excellency Monsieur Otto Abetz – and I intend to write him a memorandum on this subject – would be well advised to demand the dismissal or apprehension of these wayward auxiliaries, as well as a ‘cleansing’ of corrupt elements who dishonour the French
Police. Franco-German relations would thereby be completely overhauled, and men who, like me, are resolved to see the triumph of the policy of Collaboration in France would be ideally empowered to confound their enemies and rally their partisans.

Has your Chancellor himself not written: ‘We Aryans can conceive of the State only as a living organism that not only ensures the continuity of the race but cultivates its intellectual and creative capacities to their highest degree of freedom and fulfilment’?

The Führer would surely not gainsay me if I were to add that freedom and development can flourish only in a dynamic that is both
spiritual
and
moral
.

A few days later, I plucked up my courage and placed a call to Rue Richer.

As usual, Hermione answered the phone. I asked her firmly to let me speak to her mother. My granddaughter hesitated. I therefore asked her to inform her mother that it was about
a certain lady she had visited on the third floor of a building off Rue de Rivoli
…

A moment later, I heard Ilse’s voice – for the first time in so long! – at the end of the line. It was muted and trembling. I heard her send Hermione from the room, and then she began by begging me to forgive her.

‘It was so awful. I didn’t want to do it, but …’

In my most affectionate and reassuring voice, I gently reproached her for not having told me about her pregnancy. And then I asked her how she had found that woman.

‘It was Odette who … One of the dancers at the Opéra. They sometimes have that sort of problem. She asked one of her friends. And when I got the information, I made an appointment and went over there …’

Deeply moved, I assured my daughter-in-law that had I not had
certain religious principles I should have liked to be there with her.

I heard her sobbing on the other end.

‘Can you ever forgive me, Paul-Jean? I climbed the stairs, I rang … That horrible old woman came to the door. The flat smelled bad. Behind the old lady was a table covered in a filthy chequered cloth. Water was boiling in a pot. I saw long knitting needles …’

Mortified and sickened, I held my breath.

‘And then … I couldn’t do it, I turned around. I ran down the stairs, knocked into some man, into the street … I took the bus …’

My fist gripped the receiver. And there was I imagining that the whole affair was long past! Stammering, I interrupted her story.

‘What do you mean …? You didn’t go through with it? Are you still …?’

She was astonished. ‘But I thought it was that woman who told you … Otherwise, how would you have known?’

‘It doesn’t matter. But then … What are you going to do?’

Silence. My daughter-in-law began to cry. Between sobs, I heard her say: ‘I don’t know … It is already eleven weeks.’

I buried my face in my hands. It was unbelievable, horrendous –
every time I thought myself free from this nightmare it started up all over again
! I tried to think, but no solution came to mind for the moment. I decided to play for time. I asked her if she didn’t want to keep the child. Ilse began shouting.

‘Don’t even think of it! What about your son? … You must understand, I love Olivier. I love him,
I love him
, he’s my one and only and I’m waiting for him to come home to me!’

And she added, ‘Yes, it’s my fault. I’m an idiot. But I don’t want to lose your son because of one silly mistake.’

That hurt me. A
silly mistake
. The apogee of my extraordinary love, the miracle consecrated by the Holy Mount,
on
the Holy Mount, that unique and unimpeachable communion of our flesh and our souls
– that’s what Ilse called a
silly
mistake
!

I muttered a few befuddled words, promised to call back the next day, and hung up.

I thought about it for a few minutes, then picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect me to the German Institute in Paris. Luckily, Lieutenant Heller was still in the office he has occupied since his section was transferred from the Champs-Élysées. I needed to attack my problems one at a time. I thought that perhaps this young, well-educated officer, whom I knew to have good connections, might help me avoid having to pay off my blackmailers. I asked if he might see me the next day – that is, yesterday, Monsieur le Commandant. When we were alone together, and without mentioning anything about my daughter-in-law, I explained that I was being blackmailed by French police officers and former officers carrying the yellow cards, possibly counterfeit, of Gestapo auxiliaries. I gave him their full names, and described the colossus Club. Lieutenant Heller promised to do whatever he could. He immediately placed several phone calls, speaking in German. His face darkened as he spoke. His last interlocutor shouted so loudly that I could clearly hear his expletives from where I sat. The lieutenant hung up, sighed, and opened his arms in a gesture of impotence.

‘I spoke to the diplomatic envoy, Rahn. It’s just as I feared. Your conmen are working for a man named Henri Chamberlin, alias Lafont. A crook, but one who belongs to our secret police. His services are critical to our counter-terrorism efforts. On our authority, this Lafont had a band of criminals released from Fresnes prison to serve as his assistants, because such men are efficient, without scruple and experienced. Yet dishonest by nature, as you have learned to your cost. You must understand that these Frenchmen are very useful to us in repressing terrorism. Our occupying forces are too few and could never manage it on their own. We are waging a difficult war in the East
that is taking up much of our manpower. So it’s important that we have Frenchmen working for us. If you only knew how many denunciation letters I get! Some of them signed by your most reputable colleagues or their wives. You’d be surprised.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Others, unfortunately, are engaged in regrettable activities, such as Monsieur Paulhan, or the excellent poet Monsieur Desnos. For their own safety, I do hope those gentlemen don’t push their luck.’ He sighed sorrowfully. ‘As to your case, to put it bluntly, I have just been informed to mind my own business. Which is literature, not police work. Believe me, I am truly sorry, Monsieur Husson.’

Just nights ago I lost another son – André Pin, who looked so much like I did at twenty and who died practically before my eyes, with the heroic courage of a martyr.

If he talked under torture, it was only in the hope – sadly illusory – that the monsters who were tormenting the young dissident woman would spare her at least, if only by setting aside their diabolical implements.

I would have done the same thing if I had been in his place, Monsieur le Commandant. Yes, I would have given names without hesitating! Whilst it handed a death sentence to a farmer and some airmen who were on the same side as André, and probably to himself as well – for my son surely knew that the torturers rid themselves of anyone who was no longer useful to them – his decision was in the purest chivalric tradition of our land, because it sprang from universal compassion, the defence of a maiden, the duty to protect the weakest among us.

I was proud of André.

Proud of the unknown son whom I discovered for the first time only to lose him the same night.

I felt a savage destiny closing in on me; I was losing my children one by one.

Jeanne drowned, Olivier disowned, André murdered …

Three entirely French children. Born in France to decent Christian families.

My French family was crumbling around me. And I was left alone.

Alone?

No, quite the opposite, because new elements were appearing and growing.

I would even say,
proliferating
.

Impure elements, 100 per cent Jewish or half-Jewish. Ilse. Hermione. Aristide. And now a new seed was developing in my daughter-in-law’s belly that was half-Semitic and, worst of all, conceived in the double sin of incest and adultery!

Was not the invisible being growing inexorably in Ilse’s flesh both the monstrous, demonic embodiment of my crime, and the instrument of my punishment?

I did not want that child to see the light of day. My reasons were very different from those of my daughter-in-law, but the result would be the same. On the other hand, my religion, my beliefs – my sense of morality – forbade me from destroying it. And in any case, no crime can be redeemed by another crime!

I had been appropriately damned and punished for all that I had done to date. Through the cruel, successive blows He had dealt me, Our Lord had shown me, like the writing on the wall, the extent and abomination of my sins.

I considered the situation in despair.

If the path to a new crime was forbidden me, that meant that
God had decreed that the child should live.

But it could not live as a member of my family
. Neither Olivier nor Ilse would endure it. And I understood my German daughter-in-law well enough to know that she would never consent to entrust the child to strangers, either. As upright and sincere as she was, the idea of concealing from her husband –
the man she loved
, as she had so cruelly reminded me – the existence of a secret child would have been totally inconceivable to her.

Ultimately, as in mathematics, this dreadful equation had but one solution.

And I found it.

The one, final solution that would also free me – although it was only a secondary concern – from the grip of my blackmailers, pulling the rug from beneath their feet by removing the sole source of power they held over me.

Do you understand, Monsieur le Commandant?

In writing you this letter, I am placing the fate of Ilse Husson in your hands
.

Yes, it is to you, in all faith and friendship, dear Commandant Schöllenhammer, that I entrust the fates of the woman I love and the child, my own, that she carries in her womb.

Your Reich is opening new spaces in Eastern Europe that it is reserving for the Jewish race in order to offer a final, and humane, solution to the eternal problem of the Jew.

As a member of the elite corps of the SS, you are the vanguard of your Nation.

A high-ranking officer, you have power, good judgement and influence. You will certainly be able to place my daughter-in-law in the construction zone best suited to her situation as a young mother.

I have no doubt, of course, that it will be hard on her. I am not so naïve as to believe that the workers’ camps in the new territories of the East are restful resorts. But the Jewish people have sinned too, and they must henceforth learn, as we French are learning, to bend their backs and wield shovel and pick.

The Jews were able to corrupt or unman a nation because it is easy to break things down. And yet we had laws. But the people slipped through their net, or rather dripped. It is easy to leak away when one has been liquefied.

No need for new laws! We need only to enforce the ones we have. Or to increase the penalties threefold if you want to speed things up. Make examples. One threat and you’ll see them obey. When you have these two powers over men – the ability to terrify them and the ability to buy them – you have them where you want them. Fear is the parent of virtue. And when fear has them firmly in its grip, we will be there to provide them with the sublime motives for leading a moral life. Repression fails when it dies on the road. The Spanish did away with heresy in the sixteenth century. But you have to really want it. To have the moral strength. Behind your material strength, Monsieur le Commandant, you had moral strength aplenty, and it was that more than anything that defeated us! Give us a little of your strength, give the French the passion to forbid, to punish, not to yield! The men of France must today, here and now, nurture within themselves all the virtues related to strength, quality and self-control, with particular stress on those virtues that they have most been lacking – the manly virtues.

Let us not deceive ourselves. Merely injecting a little order into things is not the same as bringing about a National Revolution. Dusting off the old virtues is not bringing about a revolution. To bring about a revolution is to forge a new morality. And to do so without compunction. However useful they may be at any given moment, ideas and morality, when applied at the wrong time, no longer merit compunction.

In a new system, France must assume the place that, long before the trial by strength, she had earned for herself – defeat was but one sign amongst other, less dramatic signs. She must understand that the right of the victor over the vanquished is limited only by the victor’s interests (not a single voice, even among the least tainted, has been raised against the prerogatives of conquest or, for that matter, against the war itself). She must understand that Franco-German relations
will be fruitful only if they are played out in the same revolutionary climate that gave birth to Hitler’s Germany, since what we have gone through and endured, and what we will go through and endure, will have meaning only in the context of the genuine revolution that is at stake in this war.

For once, we shall have to be good losers. No weeping and wailing, no sulking, no childish base revolt passed off as patriotism, when in fact it is an insult to the word. It was
before
and
during
that we should have harassed the enemy, not
after
. We must not meet the future with bad grace. We have to take the broad view and say yes, wholeheartedly, to the events of 1940. A double acceptance of reality as it is and of a just outcome – we were beaten fair and square, and at every level. Having accepted the facts, we must embrace them. We wallowed in abundance for twenty years; I see no reason to complain about going without for a few more. The people of Paris watched as German troops marched up the Champs-Élysées. These are the vagaries of History. These are the tides of the universe.

Many times we heard it said that night would fall upon the entire world should you prevail by force of arms. But night after night since the world began, night has fallen upon the world.

Quite the opposite, it was Our Lord Jesus Christ who returned, riding the victor’s chariot. He entered by one gate, while his
co-religionists
– I am not so simple or hypocritical to forget that he was a Jew – were swept out by another.

One does not reach the light in a single journey.

One reaches it via a darkling road.

I am well aware, Monsieur le Commandant, that Ilse will suffer. And I, too, terribly, from this definitive separation.

If Olivier makes it back, I will explain it to him.

You know as well as I do that the Jewish element is one that is
foreign to our people, to our race, to our homeland. Events, general and specific, have amply demonstrated that to be true. What we must all do now is return to our proper places.

On his return, my son shall choose a French, Christian wife. Many young men have died, alas, and many more will die before the end of hostilities. Unattached women are not lacking in our country.

Beautiful and intelligent, Ilse shall in turn readily find a new male of her race who will impregnate her again. And the child yet to be born, which I allow her to take with her, will gradually acquire the place in her heart of those, my grandchildren, left behind in France.

The members of this new family will labour, pioneers of a virgin soil, to build themselves a healthy life, rich in promise.

Last night, I called my daughter-in-law, as planned.

I told her that I had found a doctor willing to deal with her delicate situation discreetly. This Dr Larrieu is younger than Dr Dimey and has no qualms about lending himself to my little stratagem. I am certain of his unwavering loyalty to the Maréchal, and you and I can count on his discretion.

Ilse and her children will arrive at Andigny station tomorrow, in the early afternoon. I’ll be waiting there with my car. We will first drop Hermione and Aristide at the villa, where the servants will watch them until my return. The appointment with Dr Larrieu is at 3.30 p.m. I will leave Ilse there, promising to be back for her in two hours. I will kiss her goodbye.

Only I will know that it is our final farewell.

The receptionist will keep my daughter-in-law in the waiting room until your police officers come for her. In the meanwhile, I shall have gone to the Sainte-Blandine Institute, where I have enrolled Hermione as a boarding student for the coming year, and whose headmistress, a saintly woman, fully understands the situation as I have explained it to
her. Two Sisters will accompany me to Villa Némésis to retrieve my granddaughter and to calm the poor child’s inevitable fears. But I know I can count on time, which soothes all pain, and on the infinite patience of our good and benevolent Sisters. I have arranged everything as far as Aristide is concerned, too, having found him a wet nurse, my cook’s niece, in the next village.

Naturally, I shall have Hermione home with me on school holidays, and my grandson, too, in a few years.

All that remains, Monsieur le Commandant, is for me to seal this letter in an envelope addressed to you. Later, I shall make one last call to my daughter-in-law to confirm our appointment tomorrow.

Please forgive me, my dear friend, for having taken the liberty today of begging the honour of your assistance. It all comes down to one cause: my great misfortune and desire to save, despite herself, a remarkable woman who is the innocent victim of a complex and frightful situation.

I commend Ilse to you, Monsieur le Commandant. Treat her well and never forget that, despite everything,
I still love her
.

I beg of you, please tell the men who will arrest her to do their duty as gently as possible.

Look on her as a simple traveller, returning to her homeland there in the East to accept her just reward of a more peaceful and better world.

Please forgive me, Monsieur le Commandant, for having burdened you with these lengthy yet, you will agree, necessary explanations, and be assured of my most devoted and respectful regard for you.

Most sincerely,

Paul-Jean Husson