The Girl in the Blue Beret (31 page)

42.

“I
DON’T REALLY REMEMBER YOU, YOU KNOW,” SAID THE DELICATE
woman at the café table. She was carefully stirring two lumps of sugar into her tea. She wore a thin gray scarf knotted at her neck, as if she might be slightly chilly.

“I do remember you—just a little,” Marshall answered. “I lived at your apartment for about two weeks.”

“
Bien sûr
. There were so many of you. But I am very happy to make your acquaintance once more.” Her smile was genuine but her eye contact uneasy.

Annette had said that her younger sister, Monique, lived in Paris, and she had suggested that Marshall call her. Marshall had been hesitant. This morning, however, only a couple of days before seeing Annette again, he decided to look her up.

Monique had a soft, shy manner. Her hands were nervous, and her voice was thin. They chatted about Paris in the old days, Monique’s parents, and Marshall’s flying career. Marshall told her about finding the Alberts, and Monique mentioned her husband, two children. Their daughter was at Boston College.

“I’m glad you have found my sister,” said Monique, touching her lips with her small napkin. “She has had a very difficult way.”

“Losing her husband must have been hard. But she seems to be emerging, don’t you think? I admire her spirit. She’s full of life, like I remember her. There was a special quality—”

“That’s not all,
monsieur
,” said Monique, leaning forward. “She won’t tell you about it, probably, unless you probe. I can see you don’t even know.”

Marshall was at a loss. “What do you mean?” he asked.

Monique paused. Then, spearing him with her eyes, she said, “In the spring of 1944, not long after you say you were with us, Annette and our parents were arrested and sent to the concentration camps in Germany. I was left behind. I did not see my mother and sister for more than a year. And my father did not return.”

Marshall froze. He stared at his hands. He had never been so shocked. For long moments, he heard and saw nothing. He couldn’t remember later what he had said then. Monique’s eyes seemed haunted. They were the color of Annette’s eyes. He remembered only what Monique said as they parted.

“I’m sorry,
monsieur
. I can’t talk about it. Perhaps my sister will tell you, but it is very hard for her. You comprehend? Even if you ask her, she won’t offer it easily.”

43.

O
N THE TRAIN TO ANGOULÊME, HE STARED OUT THE WINDOW
, hardly seeing the landscape. Having risen at five, he arrived at the Gare Montparnasse in time for an early train. But even after he bought his ticket he thought maybe he should turn back, postpone this trip until he had gathered himself. He had no idea what he should say or do when he saw Annette. Nightmare newsreels ran though his mind. Piles of skeleton people, bulldozers coming toward them, one or two arms waving feebly. A young girl and her mother, shrunken and curled. He saw skeleton people stuffed in bunks, skeleton people dressed in stripes. He saw gaping mouths. In a sealed room vapors hissed from the ceiling.

He knew so little—mainly headlines and film clips, the shocking revelations at the end of the war. Gold teeth and fillings yanked and stockpiled. Adolf Eichmann. Himmler. Barbed wire. The open pits, the bulldozers, the poison-spitting showers, the monstrous ovens. How did she ever survive?

He carried a copy of
Le Monde
but did not read it. Next to him a middle-aged woman with a feather in her hat was reading a paperback. Across the aisle were two teenagers, an amorous couple jumpy with the freshness of physical attraction. A dozen or so smartly dressed people were returning from Paris, laden with packages, exchanging tales of museums and theaters. Marshall’s mind emptied them out, emptied out the rough plush seats, turning the car into a slow, creaky thing with slats on the sides to allow livestock to breathe. In this car he positioned how many? A hundred? Two hundred? Standing pressed together, unable to move. Darkness. His mind relentlessly measured out the space. Two hundred, three hundred?

He looked out at the scenery flashing by. The farmland was lush and green—patterned fields with artfully drawn hedgerows. It seemed so calm and orderly. When he rode the night train from Paris to Toulouse in the spring of 1944, he saw at dawn the vacant fields, tinged mint green, and he was sad that the farmers had to grow food for their enemy, not their own people. He thought he remembered feeling this. But maybe not. His thoughts then centered on saving his own hide—staying quiet, keeping a wary eye on the German soldiers on the train, steeling himself to show no surprise if there was a loud noise. He was supposed to be a deaf-mute. He remembered how he had hidden his head behind a newspaper. He dozed and pretended to doze. Another airman was at the rear of the car. They were to have no contact, pass no signals. Robert was in the front of the car, and another girl guide, who seemed a bit older than Annette, rode in the car behind. The other airmen in the group were scattered throughout the train.

Now the conductor operated on Marshall’s ticket. The station of Tours was already being called, and the train would arrive in Angoulême soon. For a moment, Marshall saw in the conductor the outline of a German officer asking for his papers.

Monique said Annette might talk if he asked, but he didn’t know whether he should. It was time he did something right, he thought, but he didn’t know what that was.

44.

“Y
OU ARE HERE AGAIN!” ANNETTE SAID, OPENING HER ARMS WIDE
like her smile.

While she performed the three-cheek kiss, he breathed in the lavender on her skin, in her hair.

“I use lavender for everything,” she explained. “My husband used it on the animals. It was good for their coats. It assassinated the insects.”

She approved of his new boots.

They sat on her terrace again, and Bernard, who had greeted him happily, established himself on the stones between them.

“We are at leisure!” she said. “We have nothing that must be done. We are here, and we have a beautiful summer day.”

Her twinkling eyes contained irony, humor, history, depth. She was full of laughter, and her hands were animated, her manners less formal than before. Something had changed. Just as he was drawing back, she seemed to be advancing.

She stared into his eyes. “It is still hard to believe that you came to find me so many years after the war. You are the only one. I couldn’t search for any of you. I wanted to let the past go. I was in my life, each day—a son, a daughter, a husband, the animals.

“There was only one of the boys who was contemptuous of our circumstances. He demanded his cigarettes. He complained about our food.” She laughed. “I took him on a tour of Paris. I showed him the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, everything, and he was disdainful. I asked him, ‘Do you have anything like that in America?’ and he said, ‘No, but if we wanted stuff like this, we would buy it!’ ”

“An exceptionally ugly American,” Marshall said. “We’re not all like him.”

“No.” She smiled. “I do not know what happened to him. I did not go forth to find any of you. I had enough warm memories, and I wanted to keep them.”

“You and your family took a lot of risks,” he ventured.

“It was as though we had started on a rough crossing together, my parents and I, and we had chosen the most arduous course. As if we had a rowboat when we needed a battleship.”

“You were just a girl,” he said, after a moment. “How could your parents involve you? I mean, sending a young girl out to do Resistance work. It seems much too dangerous.”

She laughed. “My parents were very strict! At the table with adults, we did not speak. We listened. But during the war, my parents released me! They set me free! Ironic, is it not? During the Occupation, when no one was free, I was freed!”

Her exuberant tone shifted, and she leaned forward.

“My parents understood the perils, but it was, for them, the greatest emergency. Young or old, we had to do whatever the war demanded. Our shame is that many French people did nothing. Or even worse, some aided the Germans.”

She paused. “Some of the
aviateurs
were with us only a day or an hour, and some—like you—for longer. When you were with us, the Gestapo had a thousand eyes. It was very dangerous to move you south on the train, even though the snows were melting and the passage through the mountains was easing. But the Gestapo was behind every bush, and they had broken some of the escape lines. The Bourgogne survived, when others did not. We had to wait for the right moment to send you out.”

“I was stupid,” he said. “I didn’t really know the risks you ran.”

“It makes me chill,” she said, holding herself against imaginary drafts. “And yet it makes me glow with warmth to have you here, to remember the good moments. We were young. We were open.”

Her smile made him see the young girl in her again. He looked away.

She said, “When you first appeared from Angoulême in that large Citroën, I thought I was dreaming. Could it be true that one of my boys had returned and was looking for me? I had often thought of a path back to that time, with those pilots we helped. And yet it was so hard.

“I must confess—when you first came from Paris, I wasn’t even sure I remembered you. I mean, I knew who you were, and I recall your stay with us. But I wasn’t sure I recognized you. Then the next day on our drive, I remembered how you laughed. It was very specific, and it filled me with joy and anticipation. When I saw how eagerly you listened to Odile tell of her parachutists—how fervently you wanted to know the past, I was so glad you found me! This week last, while you were away, I turned it over in my mind. It is very complicated. The war is always with me, and yet it is not with me. I have wanted to remember and wanted to forget. Is it not true for you, as well? My own past seems like a stranger’s sometimes. It has so little to do with how things are now. Now I live normally. Then, nothing was normal.

“I began to look forward to your return today. I grew more eager. In my mind I began reliving what had happened. And I kept telling it in my mind. Again and again I was insistent in my mind. I made you listen. I am not sure you wanted to listen. I could not stop myself.”

Marshall tried to speak, but he stalled again. He thought about the men of wartime France—defeated, unable to protect their families. The humiliation must have been excruciating. He thought about M. Vallon, his elegant brown suit.

Marshall thought Annette would have told him everything then, but she grew quiet, and he did not press her.

THEY HIKED AT A PARK
near Cognac. The trails were wooded and moderately inclined. The hike was vigorous, and his boots were fine. The day was balmy, not hot, and walking offered them a growing intimacy—the two of them together, out in nowhere. When the trails ascended, she went ahead, and conversation dwindled. He regarded her energy and enthusiasm with wonder, not able to square it with the dark imagery in his mind.

She had made a small picnic lunch, which he carried in his new backpack. He also carried a canteen of water, but she wanted wine with a meal, with glasses, so he carried those too. She had fruit and cheese in her little pack. He had not yet given her the beret he had bought for her. He was still unsure how appropriate the gift was.

They paused near a waterfall that emptied into a churning green pool. The rush of the water obliterated the sounds of other people on the trail, and the faint spray cooled them as they sat on a flat rock and spread the picnic on a blue floral-patterned cloth.

“This is a romantic spot,” he said carefully. “We should be young again.”

“
Pfft!
In France, remember, age is different. The old are always young in their hearts.”

“I hope so.” Caroline had said something like that, he recalled.

Annette poured the wine and they clinked glasses. The wine was astringent. It puckered his mouth slightly.

She apologized. “I like it, but my sister always finds it treats her that way. She prefers the Bordeaux.”

He hadn’t yet told her that he had seen Monique, and when he mentioned it now, a flicker of a shadow crossed her face, but she brightened again immediately.

“Monique works very hard with her students—the disabilities with hearing and reading, the children who read back to front. She teaches them music.”

“Dyslexique?”

“Yes. She is a very good teacher, always helpful. Her students adore her.”

“So she is like her sister—someone who helps.”

She laughed and turned aside. She cut two thick pieces from the baguette and handed one to him.

They were silent a moment. Then, averting her face, Annette said, “Monique told you, didn’t she?” She was staring at the waterfall. “I could tell that you knew. It is in your tone, and in the way you observe me.”

He was startled, embarrassed. He wanted to see her face, to see what this moment meant. But she kept her face turned away.

“She told me very little,” he said. “I didn’t want to ask you about it. If it’s too painful, don’t say anything.”

“Oh, I can tell a story!” She waved her hand and looked at him. “I can make it very dramatic. But it is so worthless.”

“I doubt that.”

They locked eyes. “You don’t need to hear it.”

“No, I don’t have to hear it.”

Dropping her eyes, she sliced a piece of cheese for him. The waterfall was loud, intrusive.

She said, “I don’t tell it. I had asked Odile not to speak of it to you when we went to see her, and she understood. It is of no use to anyone. You have no interest in this.” She sighed. “My life is so small.”

He set his bread and cheese on the cloth and placed his hands on her shoulders. He said, “No. Your life is not small. You are a heroine. You saved men’s lives. You were active when others were afraid. Your life is not small.”

He saw tears coming in her eyes, and she allowed him to hold her. For a moment, he saw them with a passing tourist’s eye: lovers beside a waterfall, entwined in a romantic embrace, exactly the sight one was supposed to see on a scenic trail by a waterfall somewhere in France.