Gone to Soldiers (88 page)

He was not enthusiastic about her returning to school. However, it was pointless arguing now. He said only, “If you decide on either of those, Montpellier or Toulouse would do fine. No reason to return to Paris.” He was perched on the window ledge. Right outside, the previous owner had planted a pink horse chestnut, the upright torches of its flowers swarming with bees. They bloomed later here than in London.

“Oh, I have to go back to Paris at least for a while.” Her pupils were tiny, staring into the white light outside. Her eyes were pale green buds, the brown submerged for the moment.

“To trace your family?”

“To try.”

Sometimes he felt behind her words an enormous force of the unspoken, as if they did not in spite of sharing bodies and danger quite share the same world. After all, falling in love with somebody from another country meant that only slowly would he come to understand what had formed her. His image of second grade or a holiday would be at odds with hers. Time together would give them a family history and culture mingling the nature of both tributaries. Their children would be bilingual.

He reached for his pants. Time to work on his agents' discoveries. Nowadays London was sending him long shopping lists of what they wanted, and his agents risked their lives trying to supply what was demanded of them. Every few weeks, one of them disappeared, and he had to recruit somebody else, revise drops.

That night, June 5, they listened to the BBC as always. The broadcast was long, nothing special for them, and Jeff found himself daydreaming as the maddeningly uninflected voice repeated each message: “The bears have a thick coat. The bears have a thick coat. I kiss you darling, three times. I kiss you darling, three times. Holiday greetings to Papa Noël. Holiday greetings to Papa Noël.”

Then he came sharply awake, feeling as if cold water had rolled down his back. Surely he had heard wrong. “Shhhh!” he barked, although no one in the room had spoken. Mme Faurier was staring too: she had learned her codes well. “Il fait chaud dans le Suez,” the bland voice repeated.

“Merde,” he muttered, so used to operating in French he did not realize he swore in it now.

More messages. Perhaps it was not real. Then the radio said, plainly, “The die is cast.” A bit of his schoolboy Latin came back to him. Alea iacta est. Caesar's phrase. He himself was only a barnyard general. That was the second code: the call for a general uprising. It was the signal to dig out the arms and give everything they had. He considered what they had, and it was pitiful. Fine for guerrilla ambushes but absurd for open war. For months he had been asking for mortars, heavier guns, antitank weapons, but only light arms had been dropped.

He was still mulling that over when another phrase came: “The arrow will not pierce.” Then shortly after that, “Reeds must grow, leaves rustle,” repeated in that maddeningly slow voice.

After the messages had finished, Jeff rose slowly to his feet. “We've been ordered to rise! They're activating Plan Vert: the sabotaging of railroad lines. We know our objectives. Plan Bleu also put in action: that's the hydroelectric power lines. Plan Violet: cutting the underground long-distance wires. We've got those targeted into Castres. Finally, Plan Bibendum. We're to try to slow down and if possible prevent German troop movement toward the field of battle.”

“What field of battle?” Lev asked. “Are the Allies landing?”

“They wouldn't be pulling out all the stops if they weren't. It has to be now. It's come, finally, the signal for a general uprising.”

Lev, who had been getting information from the cheminots, said, “They've been bombing the shit out of Pas-de-Calais. Think that's it?”

Everybody looked to Jeff who shrugged. “Sure, the Joint Chiefs call me nightly to chat about their plans. All I know is, they're coming and they want us to raise hell.”

“About time,” Lev said. “Let's maul the Boches!”

Special Forces Headquarters had allotted them certain targets two months ago, so that he had expected the invasion in May. The main objective was to prevent the Germans moving the southern divisions north in time to box up the beachhead and wipe out the Allied troops as the British and Canadians at Dieppe had been penned in and massacred. Especially important were the German Panzer units, but the Resistance had not been given good antitank weapons.

“The railroad men must be hearing the same messages,” Lev said with satisfaction. “They're primed. They plan to carry out thirty-five cuts in the lines. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day. I suggest we go to bed now, try to sleep and meet at one. Don't we also have some bridges?”

“One rail bridge over the Agout, and one road bridge near Castres. That's ours.”

“Do we have enough explosives for all our targets?” Lev turned to Jacqueline.

“We have enough if we're elegant, not if we're sloppy.”

“Better do the Castres bridge first tonight,” Lev said to Jacqueline.

Jacqueline preened herself, a ginger cat basking in the acknowledgment of her skill. He had an image of himself in the dining room at home, what remained after years of childhood dishwashing of Viola's good china in the breakfront, The Professor ensconced in his armchair at table's head under the electric chandelier. Jeff was presenting Jacqueline. “This is my fiancée. She can make a perfect omelette and she handles plastique and dynamite with a truly professional touch.” He smiled.

Lev noticed. “Yes, Vendôme, it is good, nu, to be unleashed at last to do what we can to the bastards? Now that it's come, we can know there'll be an end. We are only responsible now for how well we strike and how well we fight, hein?”

“Can we use the Renault?” Jacqueline asked. “We can get more done if we can cover the ground fast tonight.”

“We'll risk it,” Lev decided. “We have a list of targets so long we'll be lucky to hit half of them.”

“Then why not start now?” M. Faurier asked. He looked ill with nerves.

“Too early. All right, suppose we start at midnight?” Lev rubbed his hands together briskly. “Now, take a nap. A sho in gan eyden iz oych gut.”

To which Mme Faurier said with a little girl's grin, “Az me hot a sach tsu ton, leygt men zich schlofn.”

Daniela glanced at Jacqueline and Jeff, smiling benignly as she translated: “Even a short time in the Garden of Eden is good. And if you have much work to do, go to sleep first.”

“Mme Faurier, you must stay here to serve as message center,” Jeff said. Her face drooped. Lev however winked at him. Obviously he too considered Mme Faurier might prove more dangerous to them than to the Germans. “Sophie must hurry to the scouts, telling them the messages have come and they're to travel to the Montagne Noire maquis to fight. Then both children should be sent somewhere safe, if one of the families around here will hide them while things are hot.”

“If I am here, and you are all gone, they are safer with me.”

The Jewish scouts had taken to the maquis life some months before, and now all groups were closely allied with each other and under the command of the local Armée Secrète, the military arm of the Resistance. At first the scouts had trained with sticks, but at last drops had equipped them. Some of Lev's people went to the scout encampment Friday evenings for services, as they had a rabbi with them.

During the long night, they blew the bridges they had been assigned, cut the cables underground and blew the tracks in two places, without casualties. The night reminded Jeff of Halloween in Bentham Center, when he had run wild with his friends setting bonfires, breaking windows, letting horses loose, Bernice at his heels dressed in his clothes, which fit her. He thought too of escapades with Zach, buzzing the town, landing on a frozen lake, stealing exam papers. He felt the same sharp tang of excitement alerting the nerves, the same camaraderie, the same pleasure at collective and individual boldness. It was reprehensible to admit, but this was fun. His life had for too many years since been a long mid-western highway through stubble fields down which he crept with a dust bowl wind darkening the huge sky.

He thought, we will bring our kids back here in ten years to this bridge over the Agout, and say, look, children, your mother and I blew that bridge up the night the troops landed in France to drive the Germans out. The children—he imagined a boy and a girl almost the same age, as he and Bernice had been—would stare obediently at the bridge, long rebuilt bigger and more modern, and would not believe them.

At dawn they were standing on a treeless mountain with a view for miles and miles into the blue distance, over the long low ridges broken by cliffs. The cultivated fields were russet, the rocks grey, clumps of trees dark green. Viperine and columbine glinted purple at the road's edge. Beside the path they were climbing up from the car hidden under a haystack, lizards were crawling out on the rocks to sun themselves. Wild roses were in bloom and among the grass he found a few last wild tulips, striped, and three-color violets. I am freeing this land and it will be mine, he thought: earned.

They got to bed finally at ten in the morning. When they woke, Mme Faurier had news. The Allies had landed in Normandy: both Vichy radio and the BBC agreed. “Normandy,” Jacqueline said sadly, folding her arms across her chest. “That's so far away. I hoped they would land in the south.”

They had targets for the day, although they had to move more circumspectly and under what cover they could contrive. They had a train to derail, a highway to block. When they returned, Captain Robert, their FFI representative, was waiting. “We want your troops in the Montagne Noire where we expect to be attacking the SS columns as they attempt to move toward Normandy. Get your people and weapons together and move out. It's the general uprising. The signal has come. We must strike to free France.”

Jeff frowned. “All right, we'll get ready to move. I still think Mme Faurier should stay here. She can work on the information and encode it for Achille, and keep track of where he's hiding. But I have to make new arrangements with my informants before I shift locales.”

“You're only moving a matter of sixty kilometers, Vendôme. We have orders to strike. Your soldiers should move.”

“I have a meeting tomorrow with one of my people, and it's relevant.”

Lev said, “No problem. We'll march and Vendôme can follow us after he sees his contacts.”

Captain Robert grunted. “You're wearing too many hats, Vendôme. That makes for trouble.”

“Lev knows these mountains better than I do. The next day, I'll rejoin everybody. What's the rendezvous point?”

“Gingembre took you to a village nearby, when you met Lapin. I will draw you a map now. Memorize it and then burn it, at once.”

When Captain Robert had left them, Jacqueline announced, “If you risk going into Toulouse, I'm going with you. You would have walked into the trap they set when they took Raymond, if I had not been there. Who are you meeting?”

“Thibaut, from the mairie, and Margot, most important of all, who works for the Milice. Actually, I'm only meeting Thibaut face-to-face. Margot and I communicate through a drop. Safer for her, as well as us. I have one other drop to visit too, where I'm expecting information on the guards at a munitions dump.”

The meeting with Thibaut was easy enough, a matter of both Jeff and Thibaut using a bistrot toilet and the packet changing hands. Then they headed for Jeff's old neighborhood, where he had a drop in the big cemetery, in a cornucopia showing off ceramic roses, mounted on a tomb. Under the flowers the cornucopia was hollow. It was also empty. Jeff frowned. What had gone wrong? He must try to find out what had happened to Guy, his spy at the dump.

Unfortunately they had a few hours to kill before they could expect anything from Margot at the next drop, outside the Cathédrale St-Etienne. They went to the movies and watched a story set safely in the days of Louis XIV, whom the groveling director had attempted to link with Hitler in an attempt to flatter.

They came out and argued about lunch. Jeff wanted to eat at a restaurant; Jacqueline felt the chances of being recognized if they sat about for two hours were great. Jeff slipped into a charcuterie and bought some ham, which Jacqueline would not eat. Very slowly he ate it, sitting on a bench, while she fidgeted. “That's ridiculous,” he said. “Many Jews eat ham.”

“I don't like it.” Her lip curled.

“What does it really mean to you, rational as you otherwise are, to cling to a religion suitable for a desert people four thousand years ago?”

“I knew this would come out someday, I knew it!”

“What would come out? I'm an anti-Semite if I don't agree refusing to eat lobster or ham is intelligent? And you do eat lobster—I saw you.”

“That was crayfish,” she said irrelevantly. “So, I can't resist it. But I don't eat ham. That's symbolic.”

“Of what? What has what you eat to do with your religion or with a belief in God, which you may or may not have, from what I can figure out.” Why were they quarreling? Nervousness, perhaps. Probably he was also irritable because appetizing odors of the Toulouse cooking he adored filled the air from a nearby restaurant. Jacqueline ate so little, she did not understand he required a real lunch, and furthermore, she did not sympathize with his being a little tired of the Jewish cuisine of the camp. He longed for cassoulet, for ham, for sausages, whose presence the spicy wind from the restaurant advertised.

They looked at each other warily, neither wanting to quarrel but on the verge. Jacqueline finally permitted him to put his arm around her as they approached the cathedral. “I suppose I am touchy about the subject because I'm not consistent. Mme Faurier isn't touchy. She keeps kosher.”

“You don't imagine your father does, up on Montagne Noire.”

“Oh, my, we're going to see him tonight.” Jacqueline moved closer, peering into his face. They sat on the rim of the fountain in the cobblestone square before St-Etienne. “Does he frighten you?”