Gone to Soldiers (101 page)

The Normandy front had been packed with soldiers. Every hedgerow, every pile of rocks, every orchard, every dip in the ground, sheltered someone. Jeeps or half-tracks lurked where they could. Guns were mounted anyplace commanding a line of fire. Ack-ack guns took up positions in between. Shell holes pocked the ground. Between every little node of the front wires ran connecting gunners back to their command post and connecting observers to guns. The whole front was tied together with long telephone wires. Smashed and burned-out vehicles, roofless houses, fields with great craters among the ruined crops: that was the front.

Here they stopped in villages and the driver Ari had a chat with someone local. “Ari,” Claude announced as if he were a proud parent, “is with General Leclerc but in touch with the FFI. There's already fighting in Paris and out in Neuilly. There's a general strike on, so we'd better bring in what food we can buy, which is what Ari's doing at the moment.”

When Ari came back he brought another young man called Emile with him. Emile had a rifle slung casually on one shoulder and a string bag in which she could make out a ham and some cabbages and potatoes over the other. “We'll miss the fun, my children,” Emile said in French, in which all conversation was from then on conducted. He climbed in beside Louise, put his arm around her and gave her a kiss. “A true American woman, peace must be back because we're getting tourists already.”

Louise slid out from under his arm and put her pack and typewriter between them as they bounced along. “I'm a war correspondent for
Collier's
.”

“Good, you will tell all the world how Paris is liberating herself. Are the Allies coming or not?” He poked Claude over the back of the seat. “Hey, where's de Gaulle? Is he waiting till we do all the work?”

Claude grinned over the seat. “I hear he's in France. The Americans don't want him here, the British don't want him here. Are you sure you do?”

“Ah, what can you say? He's the only leader everybody will accept. Just so long as he makes himself premier and not dictator, just so long as he respects the program of the Resistance. Better him than the Americans put Pétain back as soon as we knock him out. The Americans might even try to bring back the Bourbons, the way they tried to stick the king back in Italy. We didn't fight all these years for more of the same.”

They entered into a furious argument about the power of the various forces in the Parisian Resistance and who would try to seize power and who had the best organization and soldiers. Louise, barricaded behind her typewriter and knapsack, kept quiet and listened, taking a few discreet notes. Besides what she sent back to
Collier's, The Nation
might appreciate a rundown of the political situation in Paris, even if writing it up had to wait till she got out of the battle zone.

She gathered that there was a truce between the Resistance and the Germans, due to run out the next afternoon. They were rushing to get to Paris before it expired. They reached a suburb where the local Resistance took over the jeep and handed them bicycles. They spent the night in a closed and looted factory before penetrating into the city. Emile went off with the jeep.

Ari brought her food and sat down beside her to eat. He was wiry and tanned, with floppy brown hair, dark snapping eyes, a full mouth and well-modeled features. He gave her the impression that his good looks meant little to him.

She began her questioning. “What's your name? Where are you from?”

He was, as she had guessed, from Paris, although he had actually been born in Berlin. His parents had fled as soon as Hitler came to power. They were both doctors, but could not practice in France and instead ran a little grocery in the Jewish section. He was extremely eager to find his parents and younger brother as he'd had no news since '41. He was also hoping to find his girlfriend, a nurse, Daniela Rubin. He said she was resourceful and he was convinced he would find her.

He had gone over the Pyrénées into Spain, where he had been put in a prison camp. He had escaped, managed in ways he declined to explain to reach North Africa by boat and had joined the Free French, although his intention had been to make his way to Palestine to join the Jewish Brigade.

As they talked, she questioning him and he as determinedly if less openly questioning her, they began to get a sense of each other. He was bright, this young man, although she doubted he had much education. At sixteen he had gone to Spain, he and two pals simply slipping over the mountains to fight the Germans there. Then he had been in the French army on the Maginot Line. This French army was much tougher than that one.

Neither of them wanted to sleep. They shared a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese. “It was in Normandy a couple of days ago. De Gaulle came to review us. For some reason he stopped in front of me. ‘And how long have you been fighting, my son?' Maybe it was his manner, maybe calling me son. I said, ‘Longer than you, my General.' Which is true, because I've been at it since 1937. I want to find my people! Daniela, my brother, my mother, my father, somebody. I can feel it: Daniela's here, in Paris, I know it. As soon as I find her, I'm done with fighting. The boys with the fancy tanks and the expensive airplanes can finish the job. I haven't lived with a roof over my head, a table, a chair, a bed, since I was a kid.”

He was twenty-three. Sometimes he looked and sounded that; sometimes he sounded like a man in his forties. She thought that if Claude had selected Ari as a bodyguard as well as a driver, he could have done far worse. She suspected Ari could do more than take care of himself.

Very early they set out on the bicycles. Public transportation was on strike and nothing was working, neither the electricity nor the trains nor the apparatus by which food arrived and garbage departed. Finally even the overloaded phones had gone out. If you wanted news, you set off on foot or on bicycle to see what was happening.

Louise was pleased she had spent all those Sundays bicycling with Daniel, because she kept up with Ari far better than Claude did, who got off to a wobbly start and huffed along quite out of breath before they had gone ten blocks. Of course they were all pushing extra loads. She had her knapsack and her typewriter, although she had abandoned her bedroll because she could not balance any more on the bicycle; but Ari and Claude had the camera equipment to manage between them.

The streets were crowded. As many stores were open as were closed. The day was already heating up. She was dressed too warmly. She felt conspicuous pedaling down a Parisian street in her American uniform; it struck her as dangerous. At the bottom of the knapsack were rolled up a summer dress and a heavier one, bound by rubber bands. Her clothing was attracting too much attention. She slowed down and waited till Claude came alongside. “I had better change.”

“When we arrive,” Claude mumbled, red in the face and panting. He was pedaling doggedly, but several times Ari had to pull over to wait.

Obviously Ari was the person who knew where they were going, and Claude was only following him. When they came across the first of the barricades thrown up in a working-class district, Claude called to Ari to stop until he could shoot it. While he was occupied, Louise went into a café and changed in the toilet. The old lady sitting there asked her what the uniform was and when she said she was American, said she didn't have to pay for the toilet. That was good, as Louise had very few francs. She had been bartering soap and cigarettes. When she gave the woman a piece of chocolate, the woman stared at her with such an expression Louise thought she might burst into tears. She had always thought to work as a rest room attendant in France, it was a prerequisite to be impassive except for an aura of disapproval. Then the old lady very carefully divided the chocolate into three parts, each perhaps one inch across. “For each of my grandchildren,” she said. “How excited they will be!”

When Louise emerged, Claude was still shooting, a group of children and adults around him in front of the barricade made out of a burnt car, paving stones, old signs, mattresses, an upright piano. Everyone wanted to pose with the dozen rifles they had, plus two elderly shotguns and a stockpile of Molotov cocktails. No one expected the truce to last. Raggedy improvised tricolors hung off the balconies and windows, along with red flags and occasionally the black flag of anarchism.

“Come, there will be plenty to shoot,” Ari urged Claude. “Let's get going. You missed the siege of the Préfecture, with tanks. The Germans are still evacuating by the external boulevards. But the SS is staying and say they will fight to the death. Rol—the Communist chief—is down in the catacombs, where the phones still work.”

They pedaled on. Claude and Ari decided to drop her at
Paris Soir
, the offices of a collaborationist paper which had been taken over on Sunday by the clandestine paper
Combat
. Ari said that all the underground papers had come up during the weekend and seized offices and printing plants. Most writers and editors who had been praising the Nazis fulsomely were evacuating with their masters or had gone into sudden retreat in the countryside. The offices were on the rue Réaumur near Les Halles, which the Resistance had taken over to set up soup kitchens.

She had a little trouble overcoming the skepticism of the
Combat
staff, but finally she hauled out her smelly uniform and threatened to put it back on. She showed her credentials to everyone until somebody who could actually read them turned up. Then they let her have a desk. She got to work at once. Fortunately the recently clandestine journalists were pleased to answer her questions. Von Choltitz had been ordered by Hitler to blow up Paris, but he was negotiating with the Resistance through the Swedish consul.

A courier arrived, reporting that heavy fighting had broken out at the Buttes-Chaumont train tunnel and at the Prince Eugene barracks near the place de la République. She wavered what to do, then decided to go along to Buttes-Chaumont. Everywhere barricades were going up out of sandbags, café chairs, broken furniture, manhole covers, dismantled signs. Sporadic gunfire sounded. Far from keeping off the streets, everyone in Paris seemed to be on the sidewalks or hanging out the windows. The whole population was too excited to remain inside. The paving stones had been dug up, pissoirs dismantled, some black Citroëns set afire. One of the men explained that black Citroëns were the favored car of the Gestapo, and nobody not in bed with the Nazis had a car any longer.

She followed the pack on her bicycle. Several times they were halted at barricades. At one, wounded were being treated from a recent shootout with armed collaborationists. Louise asked as many questions as she could, scribbled notes and pedaled off madly after the pack. When they did finally reach the park—the railroad tunnel ran under it—around six, the fighting was winding down. The Resistance had captured the trains that had been parked there and a load of ammunition from the tunnel. There was little to see besides corpses and burning cars.

The reporters invited her to have supper with them. Nearby one restaurant was still in business, and they all piled in. Louise realized she still had no money, so she bartered a pack of American cigarettes to the reporters to pay for her meal. They began to be a little friendly, full of questions about when the Americans were coming and what things were like in the United States and in England. Coffee was a dreadful broth made of toasted acorns, the wine rough and unready, her supper one fried egg and rutabaga soup. As they were eating, the manager announced that no one else could be served because he was out of food.

They were putting out their paper when Ari appeared around ten. “We'll go to Claude's,” he announced. “We're all staying there.”

“Claude still has an apartment?”

“His mother is Rumanian and they were Hitler's allies. She managed to get an Aryan card, so she hung on through the war and kept his boys. Simone, his wife, they let out Thursday, when the political prisoners were released—those the Boches didn't kill before they left.” He made a slitting motion at his throat, grinning without mirth. “Even when the Boches were rushing out en masse Thursday, they shipped one last load from the concentration camp in Drancy. So recently! Even at the end, with the walls falling on them, they kill Jews. The Gestapo too cleaned house and now in all the cemeteries are little mounds of fresh earth and under them quicklime and bodies with no identification. People are digging them up trying to find their husbands, their wives, their children. Will we ever know for sure who lived and who died?”

Something in his voice made her ask, “Did you find your family or your girlfriend?”

“I found someone who saw my family deported. Let's go.”

“Does Claude really want us to come visiting? He hasn't seen his wife in years.”

“They have room.” Ari winked. “Claude said you were his friend in America, so I told Simone that you're my friend. I'll take you there and then I have to look for Daniela. The Resistance took the Hôtel de Ville, the City Hall, already. I'm hoping someone there has information.”

“Thank you for coming back for me.”

“It's nothing. Tomorrow everything's going sky-high. I just hope we don't end up with a bloodbath like Oradour or the Vercors. But the more people pour out, the better. They can't shoot down five hundred thousand people, true?”

The apartment of Claude's mother was in the XVIe arrondissement, full of ornate heavy furniture that proclaimed its worth in tonnage, with an occasional spindly antique by contrast with more curves than comfort. Glass étagères displayed collections of snuffboxes and music boxes. The mother was a wrenlike woman in black, four feet ten and weighing perhaps eighty pounds who wore around her neck a lorgnette, the first Louise had seen outside a cartoon. She was taking the invasion in good spirits, pleased to have her son and daughter-in-law returned to her. In all the splendor, everyone was eating a watery cabbage soup and ersatz bread, one slice apiece, in a salon lit by three candles and three only, as there was a candle shortage in Paris and the power was out.