Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (33 page)

M
ILLIONS OF HANDS
had pressed against the bar every day and polished it until it was shiny, unlike everything else in the Métro. Nat walked through the barrier and crossed to the other platform to get away from the woman in case she called him back. She had looked at him for several seconds, saying nothing, and then she had said, ‘
Passez!
’, but without looking any friendlier.

A train came and not many people got off. Nat did not get into the last carriage, which was where he was supposed to go. He lifted the metal handle and forced the doors apart, like Samson or a lion-tamer. He had to use both his hands, which made his coat come open. Once he was inside, he turned to pull the doors together, standing as close to them as he could, then he clutched his coat and sat down.

He saw the people who had got off the train racing backwards along the platform. Then black girders went by, and there were faces in the window staring back at him or just looking out of the window. He saw his own face and his eyes, which looked like dark holes. No one spoke in the Métro any more. The train sped up but not very much because the next station was not far away. The faces began to vanish, and there was the street just below, with the buses’ white roofs and gas tanks, and policemen standing in groups, then lines of trees and the wide river, where the buses couldn’t go. He saw the Eiffel Tower turn slowly and begin to walk away to the right.

A man stood up and went towards the door. Windows flew past–a balcony covered in plants, a big room with a chandelier and a table. The windows were close enough for Nat to climb into the room if the train had stopped. At first, when it reached the station, the train kept moving because he was not in the last carriage. Then it screeched to a stop, and he saw ‘
PASSY
’ on the wall.

This was the end of the
Métro aérien
. Daylight came from the river, but the roof blotted out the light from the sky. Soon, the train would go back underground. He said to himself, ‘Trocadéro, Boissière, Étoile’. He tried not to think too hard ‘Étoile’, which is what he was wearing on his sweater above his heart.

A
NNA
did not look back. When she saw the bridge and the red sign, she knew where she was going, and she knew how to use the Métro on her own. Then she did look back.

The man with the sweeping brush and the little sailboat on his cap was staring straight at her. He lowered his chin and made his head point across the street to where the Métro was. She kept her eye on him while she crossed the street to see if he would do anything else, but he just kept pointing with his head at the steps that went up into the Métro.

She still had the five-franc coin with the Maréchal’s face on it. She would be safer in the Métro if she did not get into the last carriage. She put the coin on the counter and the woman took it and gave her a ticket and four coins, which she put into her pocket. If anyone asked, she would say she was going shopping for her mother, though she didn’t know where she was going because there was no one left at home. But her mother would find her in the Métro. She went under the sign that said
DIRECTION ÉTOILE
, because that was where all the different lines came together. Her own station was on a line that went to É toile, but it was a long way away, on the other side of Paris.

U
NDER THE GANTRIES
, applause broke out and washed about for a while, then stopped. Beyond the galvanized steel lamps, where the words said
RIZLA
and
PHOSCAO
, there was just the faintest flickering of hands. Then a loudspeaker rasped out some names and other syllables, which quickly lost their force and joined the felted layers of dust and sound; whoever was speaking into the microphone evidently had no idea of the effect of his voice. The noise and dust were so dense that shouts and screams were either muffled or too much a part of everything else to be noticed. It was like the oceanic clamour of a railway-station concourse, composed of nothing but the shuffling of clothes, limbs being stretched, a gasp, something dropped on concrete. A woman banged her head on the floor for nearly a minute before a policeman came to knock her unconscious.

Some of them were lying on the steeply banked track, which was dangerous because it was at least eighty feet from there to the top of the stands, and people occasionally jumped off. Other families were still arranged in little encampments marked off by bags and coats, which they tried not to move when the latest influx began to filter through. Some had been found at home with the gas-pipe in their mouth. A woman in the fourteenth
arrondissement
had just finished throwing her children out of the window, and then herself. A young man had seen her do it, and they all died, though someone else said it had happened at Belleville, and by the time the woman jumped, firemen were holding the blanket to catch her.

In the buses, the window seats had all been taken by children, who wanted to see where they were going. In the tenth
arrondissement
, the policemen who knocked at Mme Abramzyk’s door found her holding her six-year-old son; they told her to get her things ready and they’d be back in an hour…But when she rushed down to the ground floor, saying thank you God for this great mercy, the concierge came out of her lodge, where she had the Maréchal in a frame on the sideboard with his country suit and his hunting dog, and bolted the door to the street.

They had all been slow to respond to the rumours, and almost no one had seen the leaflet sent out by the communists, which they only heard about later on. Someone had received a
pneumatique
, someone else a telephone call–because luckily they had not yet been disconnected. They had sat and discussed it the whole night: it would only be men, or it would only be immigrants; families with little children or with fathers who were prisoners of war would be left in peace. Someone’s father had been pulled off a train in the Métro by a complete stranger who said he was delighted to see him again after so many years and then told him on the platform, before getting back on the train, that he was a police agent and that he should not sleep at home that night.

Now, in the grimy colosseum that contained whole
quartiers
without any dividing walls, rumours caused sudden eddies and movements of people. In an inner courtyard somewhere behind the stands, bread was being thrown down from the windows of a workshop in the Rue du Docteur-Finlay where they made gears for Citroën cars, and the neighbours who had seen the children’s faces in the buses and smelled the rising stench had been going there all day with food.

Anna’s mother watched for these wild surges of the crowd and the drift of bodies towards the exits. Her daughter had escaped and might be standing in the street waiting for her. She had already spotted a boy slip out of the same exit and she hadn’t seen him since. The thought that she might miss her only chance was too much to bear. She picked her way through the bodies, watching the exits, and sometimes she went right up to a policeman, who must have a mother himself, but it was only when she gave in to her anger that she made an impression. The policeman almost screamed at her, ‘I’ll put you in solitary if you don’t get back in there!’–as if they had cells in the Vel’ d’Hiv. So she shouted back at him,

‘Let me go! What difference does it make to you, one victim more or less?’

The policeman shrugged his shoulders, and said, in a quieter voice, ‘Get back in there.’ Then he turned away, and she saw the cropped hair below his cap and his stiff shoulders, and he seemed to be finished with her, so she walked out into the street.

Some women were standing in a doorway. She went towards them, and when they realized she was going to talk to them, they seemed to shrink back into the wall. She said, ‘Let me in. I have to hide.’ One of the women, who seemed more frightened than she was, said, ‘No, no! Keep going. Don’t stay here.’

The wind wafted the smell of her own clothes into her nostrils, and it was only a matter of time, she thought, before she was dragged back inside, and her daughter would be lost. But then she saw in the gutter what looked like an old coat-sleeve lying at right angles to the kerb with something wrapped in it, and the water rushing out of the drain, and a sloppily dressed man with his City of Paris cap, coaxing the rubbishy water along with his broom. She walked up to him, and as she passed, said, ‘Follow me!’, which he did, and he kept following her until they reached the Métro.

At the foot of the steps, she looked round and thought she saw the man smile at her, and he raised his hand briefly as if to say goodbye and then went back to his sweeping.

Another bus was coming round the corner from the Seine, with suitcases piled high on the rear platform, and children’s faces pushed up against the windows.

T
HIS WAS SOMETHING
that happened at É toile and nowhere else: there was only one line but two platforms. The doors were opened on one side to let everybody out, then the doors on the other side were opened for the people who were waiting. Anyone who left the train was separated from the other passengers by the width of the carriage. As he walked along the platform, Nat looked through the carriage windows and saw some German soldiers waiting to get on with their rifles and gas masks slung over their shoulders so that they could carry all their parcels and shopping, but there were no policemen, which was more important.

He walked to the end of the platform where the metal plate said
TUNNEL INTERDIT AU PUBLIC
–
DANGER
, then he walked through the barrier with all the other people. These days, the escalators never worked and the electric lights were always dim. He climbed the stairs as slowly as all the grown-ups around him. There was a pain in his stomach which reminded him that he had not had anything to eat, though he did not feel hungry.

At the top of the escalator, he stopped behind a pillar that someone had used as a urinal and, reaching inside his coat, he tugged at his sweater and pulled off the star, which he crumpled in his fist and put into his pocket. There were men and women everywhere, heading off into tunnels with the look of people who knew where they were going. He stood in front of the Métro map for quite a long time, following the coloured lines with his eye and, to make it look more convincing, he also studied the board that listed all the stations that were closed. On the map, he mostly followed the blue line that went from É toile to the top-right corner of Paris. He saw B
ELLEVILLE
and C
OMBAT
and P
ELLEPORT
, and then he thought of his friend from school, Elbode, who did not have to wear a star and whose parents had always been very polite to him.

There were so many people in the station now that sometimes they bumped into anyone who was just standing there. Anna’s mother had come into the concourse from the Quai de Grenelle platform and thought it miraculous that she had found her daughter there, though Anna had simply got off the train and waited patiently in the part of the station where all the different lines came together. When he turned away from the map of the Métro, Nat saw a little girl being squeezed against her mother’s skirt, and he wondered if he should go and speak to them, but instead, he went past them and joined the crowd of people heading for the sign marked
NATION
.

Later that day, he stood on the landing in front of the door where the Elbodes lived, and it was a moment he often relived after he crossed the demarcation line a few months later on his way to Grenoble and entered the Zone Libre.

A
LL OVER
P
ARIS
–that day and in the days to come–people were discovering new parts of the city. It was almost as if they had never lived there before. The Rimmler family at 51, Rue Piat discovered that there was a little room above the garage next door to their apartment block where ten people could sleep if they sat with their backs against the wall. At 181, Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, the Tselnicks’ concierge unlocked one of the old maids’ rooms on the fifth floor which they had never seen or even thought about before. In the Rue des Rosiers, where people going to work were surprised by the unusual silence, a boy had been placed in the rubbish bin by his mother and was still covered in kitchen waste when he was taken to a neighbour’s house and from there to a reception centre in the Rue Lamarck. Some families moved into back staircases and attics, or into curtained cubby-holes in neighbours’ apartments, and felt as though they had been transported a great distance, though they were just a few feet from home.

When all those previously unsuspected places were brought into use, it seemed as though the city was revealing some of its secret resources in an attempt to accommodate a new influx of people, though in reality there were thirteen thousand fewer people in Paris than a day or two before.

While the stinking velodrome was emptied out by buses bound for Drancy in the north-eastern suburbs, and then by trains bound for somewhere in the east, the people who were left in Paris waited in their rooms and hiding-holes, never spending more than two nights in the same place. Anna and her mother lived like hunted animals for two years before they were arrested again and sent to the unknown place that children in their games called ‘Pitchi Poï’. Since none of the fugitives could venture out, they had to use other people’s food coupons and tried to make their neighbours’ generosity last as long as possible.

As usual, concierges had to rack their brains looking for solutions to unanticipated problems. They cut off the water and the gas and the electricity, as they were told to do, but the policemen also had orders to leave any domestic animals with the concierge. Some of those snug little lodges on the ground floor of apartment blocks turned into foul and overcrowded menageries overnight. Cats were set free–there had been warnings in the paper about lethal bacilli passing from vermin to cats and from them to human beings–but when it became obvious that their owners would never return, dogs, rabbits, guinea-pigs and even songbirds were used to supplement the meat ration, which, since life showed no sign of becoming any easier, is probably what would have happened to them anyway.