A Troubled Peace (13 page)

T
he next morning, Madame Zlatin put Henry to work disinfecting the deportees' tattered clothes. She gave him a surgical mask and a hand-pumped spray can full of DDT. “Work quickly,” she told him. “The clothes are covered with lice that carry typhus. The disease killed thousands at the camps.”

Henry pumped the plunger of that can until he thought his arm would fall off. He refilled it a dozen times, wreathing himself in clouds of dank, chemical smells. And still there were clothes tossed out across tables needing to be deloused. Every time he finished, nurses came carrying more bundles. Henry began to feel like Sisyphus in the Camus book that Madame Gaulloise had given him. Sisyphus, according to mythology, was condemned by the Greek gods to spend eternity pushing a boulder up
a mountain only to have it roll back down again. Henry found the hopelessness of Sisyphus's labor, his inability to change his fate, incredibly annoying. He couldn't figure why it had been so important to Madame Gaulloise that he read it.

At noon, his head banging from the DDT fumes, Henry begged for a break.

The nurses nodded but asked him to hurry. As soon as the deportees had showered, they needed to put their clothes back on. Stripped of their possessions over and over again by the Nazis, these clothes were all the deportees had left. If there were new clothes to be found, the government promised to give them first to the million returning French POW soldiers.

Outside, Henry found the same chaos as before. He waded through the crowd to the board. The note for Pierre was still there. He scanned the street. Nothing.

He re-entered the hotel through the front door, under a carving of a great ship framed with smiling cherubs holding huge bunches of grapes, and squeezed past families begging to speak to officials. He found Madame Zlatin in the hotel's massive kitchens. She was explaining how much of the stew and pureed potatoes each deportee should receive. The sicker ones, those who weighed forty-eight kilograms or less, about a hundred pounds, could only eat broth, she said.

Henry marveled at how many pots were full and boiling. “Wow,
madame
, where did you come up with all this?”

“The deportees are given the highest priority for food.” With a wry smile she added, “Much of this comes courtesy of the Reich. During the occupation, Hitler's Abwehr, his counterintelligence, was housed here. His officers demanded the same grandeur the hotel had offered guests before the war—caviar, champagne, cabaret performances. But when the battle for Paris began, the Nazis left the cold rooms stocked to the rafters with lamb and pork, cheeses and wines.” She shrugged. “So we make good use of it.”

Henry asked if she had heard anything about Pierre.

“No,
monsieur
. Patience.”

“Patience-smatience,” Henry muttered to himself as he went back to work.

When twilight fell, Henry fled the Lutetia. He'd had enough of its sad sights for the day. He was relieved that he'd had no flashbacks sparked by what he was witnessing. Lilly's voice came to him.
Sometimes you get back on your feet better when you're helping someone else stand in the process.
Maybe so. Seeing other people fight to survive, to walk away from the agonies they'd endured, was definitely prodding him to do likewise. Realizing that he was not the only one confronting personal demons also helped Henry to feel a little less like a freak. Plus, having a purpose—finding Pierre—gave him direction. He was beginning to feel
like an effective human being again. But he realized his redemption hinged completely on finding Pierre.

Henry went to the notice boards. The note to Pierre was still pinned in the same spot. Henry searched the park. It was empty, the little gang gone, perhaps hiding from him. The only people there were a few deportees who had slipped out of the hotel. They sat on the park benches, gazing up at the flowering trees, smiling, free. Henry knew they were supposed to stay inside as the staff nursed them back to health. But he sure wasn't going to tell on them.

 

The next day passed in the same manner. And the next three. Henry must have asked Madame Zlatin a dozen times a day if she'd heard anything. “No,
monsieur
, nothing yet,” she always answered gently. Finally, she told Henry to trust her. “There are many of us watching for Pierre and his mother. We will not forget. The absents do not forget either. They read our notes, looking to help us know the fate of those who are lost. Even amid the sorrows of thousands, we all know that we must restore the world one child at a time.”

She glided away. “Now that is one kind lady,” Henry murmured. “Just like Ma.” The nurse folding towels near him looked up, thinking he was talking to her.

“Elle est gentille.”
He repeated that Madame was kind.

“Oui,”
the nurse agreed,
“la Dame d'Izieu est très gentille.”

“I meant Madame Zlatin.”

Another nurse explained. “We call her the Lady of Izieu because of the children.”

“Children?”

“She hid forty-four Jewish children in the countryside near Izieu. One of her neighbors reported her to the Gestapo. They captured the children and sent them to Auschwitz. All of them were gassed to death. Madame escaped the raid because she was away trying to find other hiding places for them. Her husband was taken. His fate is unknown. She has put his picture on the wall with the others. She waits to learn.”

Henry hung his head.
Forty-four children. Sweet Jesus.
Every story he heard put him in his place. He could find the patience to wait for Pierre to appear. At least he knew Pierre was alive.

 

Walking to the Hotel Scribe that evening, Henry purposefully turned up streets where he heard happy conversation. As he wandered, Henry felt compelled to reach out and touch the artistic decorations the French had chiseled into the stone of their buildings—tangible reminders that humans could produce beauty as well as devastation. He was particularly struck by a pair of marble doves roosting in the stone frame of a window that was pockmarked
with bullet holes fanning out in a spiderweb of cracks—scars from the street fighting to liberate Paris.

He crossed the Boulevard Saint Germain to a cobblestone square with a medieval church in its center. The square was rimmed in cafés. One in particular was packed with people and raucous with arguments, jokes, singing, and glass-clinking toasts. Its tables spilled out under a dark green awning marked
CAFÉ DES DEUX MAGOTS
. Henry scratched his head—did that mean “the two maggots?” Well, he thought, he'd eaten snails with the
maquis
, and they'd been surprisingly tasty.

Henry thought about going in, but a group of women, enthusiastically shouting responses to a speaker deep in their circle, caught his attention. All Henry could see was a fist raised in the air above the other women's heads and a female voice calling,
“Maintenant nous pouvons voter!”
Now we women can vote!

“Bravo! Vive la France!”

“Nous-laisserons nous jamais réduire au silence de nouveau?”
Will we allow ourselves to be silenced?

“Non!”

“Êtes-vous prêtes à toutes travailler ensemble?”
Are you all ready to work together?

“Oui!”

The female voice went on to say that their work with the Resistance had shown women to be equal to men.
Women deserved equal pay and female delegates in the new legislature. Vote for women candidates! she shouted.

Listening, Henry could just imagine the comments his high school buddies would make: “Now why would the gals want to worry their pretty little heads over men's business?” Unlike the French, American women had been voting for decades. But Henry knew of only one woman ever elected to Congress. It'd be pretty amazing if the French actually voted in a few.

Boy, Patsy would love this, thought Henry. She hated having to package her thoughts into the ladylike manners the state of Virginia demanded. She was always getting herself in trouble at school for speaking her mind and questioning teachers. Her heroine was the outspoken Eleanor Roosevelt, even though half the country made fun of FDR's first lady, claiming she was unattractive and bossy.

A one-sheet newspaper was passed through the crowd. Titled
Femmes Françaises
, the paper had recipes for rutabagas and patterns for making children's shoes. But it also called for women to demonstrate against black marketers and for fairer rationing.

As the crowd broke up, Henry saw the back of the speaker. She wore a man's leather jacket and an odd skirt shaped like a lampshade that was made of panels of different materials, even silk scarves. She'd obviously had to
make do with what she could scrounge. She also had on roller skates. That was clever, too, thought Henry, if she needed to cover a lot of ground quick, although going over cobblestones in those would be pretty teeth-rattling.

Henry wondered whether Pierre was clad in such a mishmash as well. He sighed, no longer distracted, and turned toward the river.

Suddenly from behind him came a
whirrrrrrrrrrrr
of metal wheels clattering over the stones. Before he could move out of the way, a hand grabbed Henry's elbow. The out-of-control speed of the roller skates hurled both him and the skater to the ground. With a curse, Henry landed face-first. The hand jerked him back and rolled him over.

“Mon Dieu. C'est toi! Henri!”

A girl with amber cat-eyes smothered him with kisses.

His mind spinning from the whack to his head and the embrace, Henry pushed her away, completely befuddled.

“Ah, once, you did not mind my kisses, Henri. Do you not know me? It is Claudette.”

Henry stared. “Claudette?”

“Oui, oui!
I thought you were dead. When you lured away those soldiers so that I could escape the Nazis, I feared they would shoot you. I cannot believe you live!”

H
enry had forgotten how insistent, how fiery, Claudette was. But it came back quickly as she pulled on his arm and demanded that he meet her friends. “I told them that an American saved me from capture. They must see that you survive.
C'est un miracle!”
She wasn't about to let go of his arm. And remembering how she'd flattened the Resistance fighter who had tried to run her out of the
maquis
camp, Henry wasn't about to argue.

He had not forgotten her beauty. She reminded him now of the Grecian-style marble women that held up the arches of the Opera House. With a long straight nose and high cheekbones, Claudette had a dramatic profile very like those of the chiseled statues. Her thick black eyebrows arched naturally, with none of that silly plucking the glamour girls did back home to create pencil-thin lines.
Her almond-shaped eyes were large and that unnerving yellow-green color. But it was her full lips that made her so exotic-looking. Patsy had lips like that, too, and seemed just as unaware as Claudette of how pretty they were.

Patsy. Henry felt a sudden pang of homesickness. And then a little twinge of guilt for appreciating Claudette's looks. Well, heck, he thought, Pats had turned him down, hadn't she? And here was this gorgeous French girl who was thrilled to see him. He pushed Patsy's memory aside and followed Claudette.

Claudette led them to a Metro stop, where she replaced her roller skates with wooden clogs she pulled from a straw bag. “No leather for slippers yet.” She sighed. “These are so heavy. I prefer to skate, but I cannot walk stairs in them.”

As she changed, a man crept from the dark stairwell, holding out a Hershey bar.
“Du chocolat américain,”
he hissed.
“Soixante francs.”

Henry stepped forward, instinctively shielding Claudette. But she brushed past him to hit the black marketer in the chest with her roller skates.
“Cochon!”

The man howled in pain.

She swatted him again. “Black-marketers should get the death penalty! You sell things at such prices that we must bankrupt ourselves to eat. Because of you, children starve! Thief!”

Henry almost laughed. This was precisely what he recalled most about Claudette—a tiny spitfire taking on a squadron of enemies. But he also remembered that her self-righteous bravery threw her into danger constantly. Just as Claudette hauled off to hit the man again, he pulled a knife out of his pocket. The man jabbed at her, narrowly missing as Henry yanked her away and punched him in the face.

The man stumbled back spitting blood. All that boxing Henry's dad had forced him to do finally paid off! He'd have to remember to tell Clayton. Henry held up his fists—ready. “Come on!” But the man ran off instead, hurling insults at Claudette.

Claudette's eyes shone. She did love a fight, didn't she?

“I see you have regained your strength,” she said. “No longer the half-starved boy I found stealing from my orchard.” She took his hand again and led him down the dark stairs to the underground trains. They paid for second class, but she talked them into first, settling down on the upholstered benches with a sigh of contentment.

As the train rattled through the pitch-black tunnels, Claudette's lips brushed his again. “That is for saving my life for a second time,” she whispered.

“Oh, that wasn't saving your life,” Henry said of the man in the Metro. “You would have been all right.”

“You are too modest, Henri.” She kissed him again,
then pulled back and looked at him with puzzlement. “Why do you not return my kisses? Are you not happy to see me?”

“Lord, yes! I am so glad to see you, Claudette. You have no idea.”

“Then why—?” She broke off abruptly, remembering. “Ah. The American girl,
oui
? Did you marry?”

Henry smiled ruefully. Ironically, the moment he and Claudette kissed in the Morvan a year ago was the moment when Henry realized clearly that he was, in fact, in love with Patsy. “No, we have not married.” He paused, then added, “She turned me down.”

“Oh, Henri,” Claudette said sympathetically. “Then she is a fool.” Claudette kissed him on the cheek.

This time Henry kissed her back.

 

They exited the Metro in the Montmartre district, climbing a hilltop of stairs to a huge, white, domed church that looked like something from India. “Basilique du Sacre Coeur,” Claudette identified it when Henry paused to catch his breath and gawk a bit. “It was built to honor French soldiers who died in the Franco-Prussian War. But it was not completed until 1914, in time for us to mourn the one and a half million lost in the First World War. And now we grieve for more.”

They both gazed up at its towers.

“You know, I haven't done any sightseeing here at all. I should at least see the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame and…and the Louvre.” He felt strange about listing the museum to Claudette, since Patsy was the reason he wanted to go.

“It opens again next week,” Claudette told him. “I will take you.”

For a moment he wondered if he should see her again, but only for a moment. Henry replied enthusiastically, “That's a date.”

They began to walk on, but Claudette stopped. “Henri, why are you here if not to sightsee like the other American soldiers?”

He told her about Pierre, about the Lutetia.

“So, you are still the savior,” she said with quiet seriousness.

Henry shook his head. “Not me, Claudette. I'm no savior. I wouldn't be alive if it weren't for Pierre, or Madame Gaulloise, or you.” He kissed her hand. “And to tell you the truth, an old German soldier. He took me out to a field on orders to shoot me. I had to dig my own grave. And then…” Henry paused remembering how he'd put down his shovel and closed his eyes and tried to lift his soul onto the winds, like a kite, waiting for the gunshot that would end his life. “Then he just told me to go home.”

“What?”

“I know. I couldn't believe it either. He told me to go
home and pointed me west. American tanks were about ten miles off. The brass always told us to try to find regular German army if we had to turn ourselves in—to save us from the SS and Gestapo. They even said some old-school officers tried to overthrow Hitler. That old sergeant who let me go wasn't a Hitler fanatic. He was clearly a World War One veteran defending the fatherland again. I think he just decided that he'd had enough killing.”

For a moment, Henry remembered the soldier's sad old face. “You know,” he added quietly, “I heard a deportee tell a nurse today that she had survived the march from one slave-labor camp to another because a German woman put out a trough of hot, cooked potatoes for the prisoners to take one as they passed. That woman risked a lot to do that, don't you think?”

“Mon Dieu.”
Claudette's face flushed. “I have never considered such things possible from
les boches.
We must give thanks for your life, Henri.” She led Henry into the church. They knelt before a huge mosaic of Christ with outstretched arms that glowed in the candlelight.

Claudette clasped her hands. Henry heard her whisper a prayer asking to shed her hatred. He glanced over at her in surprise. Nazis had murdered her mother and executed thirty people in her village on the word of a neighbor who accused them of feeding the
maquis
hiding nearby. He remembered well her desire to kill every Nazi she could,
her calling him a fool for believing in God. “If God exists,” she'd said bitterly, “how could all this happen?”

Back then, Henry had told Claudette that she must not act in revenge, that if she did, she would be as dead inside as if the Nazis shot her. But now, seeing the complete annihilation of the Vercors, the death of Madame, and the starved and haunted at the Lutetia, Henry was feeling similar rage, despite the German soldier, despite the one woman with her potatoes who'd been brave enough to be kind. He was ashamed of it but did not have the force to suppress it, not yet.

Neither he nor Claudette managed a real prayer. Within a few minutes they stood and left, Henry wondering if he'd ever completely heal that way.

 

Behind the basilica, Montmartre moaned with music. Claudette's mood shifted instantly upon hearing it. “Jazz is back,” Claudette said, grinning, “and dancing. They were forbidden as disrespectful while the war continued. Now with victory in Europe, we can dance again. I will put on my good dress and we will go. Yes?”

Henry was game.

Claudette lived on a narrow, damp back street. Her concierge was as uninviting as the house. “Yes, but she knew how to be vague when the Gestapo searched,” Claudette whispered as they climbed to the third floor. “All my
friends were Resistance. My roommate made false papers. The boys down the hall worked on
Combat
with Camus.”

Madame Gaulloise's Camus? “Hey, I have a book of his and—” He stopped short when Claudette tapped once, paused, and then added a sequence of:
tap…tap, tap-tap
, before opening the door.

“Why the signal?” Henry lowered his voice.

Claudette smiled self-consciously. “Habit. Surprise was something we did not like.”

It was a tiny room with a narrow, rolled-arm couch, a cane-seat chair, and small table with one candle on it. That was it. A cracked window opened onto an alley festooned with underwear drying on lines strung up between clay pot chimneys. Henry thought of Claudette's beautiful old house and orchards in the Morvan and asked the same question she had of him: “Why are you here in Paris?”

“To be part of the change, Henri! It is our chance to change France for good. I work for the UFF,
Union des Femmes Françaises
. We print our newspaper. We speak out for jobs and equal pay for women. We demand the government provide good child care so that mothers can work and not fear for their babies. This October, the country will elect the Constituent Assembly. I campaign for the women who wish to be elected.”

She pulled two jars from the cupboard. “All I have is applesauce and canned peas, oh, and prune liqueur. Would
you like a little? In a few days I will queue for more. I am a J-three, between fifteen and twenty-one years of age. I am granted four eggs a month and three hundred fifty grams of bread a day, plus all the turnips and rutabagas I can carry away, so I am not bad off. They want young people to regain strength. We have much work to do!” she echoed
le patron.

Tap…tap, tap-tap.
Claudette's roommate entered.

“Giselle.” Claudette nearly hopped up and down. “This is Henri! The flier I told you about. The man who saved my life! He is alive. Can you believe?”

The roommate eyed Henry. She did not smile. Unlike the vivacious Claudette, this girl's personality was as thin as her frame. She'd survived the war, but clearly just barely. Mechanically, she held out her hand to shake Henry's.

Claudette made Old World introductions: “Henri, this is Giselle Balmain. Giselle, this is Henri…” She stopped. “
Ça alors!
Henri, I do not know your last name!”

 

Claudette recruited five more from their floor to join her celebration. The young men were cold to Henry at first, until Claudette told of Henry's repairing cars and fusing plastique explosives at the
maquis
camp. Then the Frenchmen opened up and talked about the battle for Paris, the difficulty in finding petrol to make Molotov cocktails to hurl at German tanks. “Empty wine bottles to
put the petrol in? They were simple to find,” they joked. They teased one friend who said he was too tired to dance because he pedaled a stationary bike for hours each day to charge a generator that ran hair dryers in a hair salon. Shrugging good-naturedly, the man told them they should all be so lucky as to find work, especially work surrounded by beautiful women.

The group traveled from café to cabaret, collecting more friends as they went. They avoided the places they knew for sure served cat meat as beef. The songs the chanteuses sang were throaty and bawdy. The group's conversation was loud and off-color, opinionated minidramas. They spoke with large gestures and exaggerated facial expressions, leaning close to one another to make a point, far closer than any American would tolerate. They argued hotly about the best ways to improve France's economy, to make things more equal between the classes and the sexes.

As Henry listened, he realized that most of them were very left-wing in their thoughts, probably communist, including Claudette. Were these the type of people Thurman was concerned about watching? The type of people Thurman might keep a known Nazi in tow to ferret out? Henry couldn't see how these passionate, brave young people, devoted to building a better future, could be such a threat to American interests. If Orwell's para
noia about government was right, Henry would have to be careful around the Hotel Scribe. He didn't necessarily agree with the philosophies of Claudette and her friends, but the last thing he'd want to do is somehow bring the scrutiny of Thurman and his agents down on these youths. They'd had to watch their backs enough already.

As the night raced on, Henry tired of politics and focused on Claudette. While the others grew tipsy on the watered-down wine or on their dreams or on the pumped-up jazz beat, Henry lost himself in her, her new
joie de vivre.
Her bitter rage, her aura of tragedy, had been replaced with high hopes. Her new spirit was intoxicating.

She pulled him onto the packed dance floor to jitterbug to wildly fast music. They crashed into other dancers, boys grabbing her for a swing around the floor and thrusting other girls into Henry's arms and then exchanging again—a mass of happy, sweating, sashaying young people in one big dance of unencumbered rejoicing. Claudette's laugh rang out with the music and Henry realized it was the first time he had ever heard her truly laugh.