A Hero of France: A Novel Read online

  —

  At twelve-thirty, two faint taps at the door.

  Mathieu had been lying on the sofa, hands clasped beneath his head, so excited by anticipation that he couldn’t read his book. By the time he got to his feet, Mariana was waiting at the door, ready to welcome the visitor—she’d recognized the person in the hallway as a friend.

  “Come in, Joëlle,” Mathieu said.

  She opened the door, scratched Mariana on the chest, then embraced Mathieu. He kissed her lightly on the lips, his finger touching her lower back, just where the cleft of the bottom parted. There was wine on her breath. For scent she wore vanilla extract.

  He held her at arm’s length, his eyes moving up and down, then said, “And how are you?”

  In answer, her face and hands moved a certain way, a variation on the Gallic shrug which meant not too bad. She lived in a room on the fourth floor of the Saint-Yves and worked in the records department of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital on the Île de la Cité. A month earlier, she and Mathieu had begun a love affair. Joëlle was in her thirties, with the creamy-brown skin of southern France. She was slim and lithe, had shining eyes, a warm, irresistible smile that could turn mischievous, and chocolate-colored hair that hung below her shoulders. “I have a request,” she said.

  “Which is…?”

  “Before we…do anything, I would like to wash myself.”

  “I’ll heat you a pan of water,” he said. “Don’t attempt the bidet”—the powerful spurt of his bidet was ice-cold—“you’ll hit your head on the ceiling.”

  “My God, I miss hot water.”

  Mathieu went into his kitchen, filled a pan with water and set it on the burner atop his kerosene stove. The tiny flame flickered blue but, if you waited, it would heat whatever you had. In the corner of the kitchen was a folded blanket that Mariana settled on when she wasn’t wanted in the bedroom—dogs knew not to disturb intimacy but still, they watched. Now Mariana lay down on the blanket and sighed.

  “How was work today?” Mathieu called from the kitchen.

  “Pretty much like always. My friend Valérie has a new man, we asked her about him but she doesn’t really know who he is—she said it was like making love to a stranger, now and then he disappears, and he lives in a hotel somewhere, that’s where they meet.”

  Like us.

  He had never told Joëlle of his secret life, trying to protect her, trying to make sure that if, God forbid, she were interrogated, she could say nothing that would suggest she was involved with what he did.

  He tested the water with his finger, then went into the bedroom. “Very well, ma petite,” he said, as though to a child, “time for your bath.”

  She slipped off her sweater, slacks, and much-darned wool stockings, and wriggled out of her long underwear. Mathieu took her hand and led her to the bathroom, then brought in the pan of tepid water, a bar of soap, and a washcloth. Gesturing with the washcloth he said, “May I, mademoiselle?”

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “Well, yes, you may, but as I am undressed, you must be too.”

  He took his clothes off and hung them on a hook on the door.

  She met his eyes and smiled.

  “And now, please raise your hands,” he said.

  She raised her hands above her head, he dipped the washcloth in the water, swiped it on the soap, and began to wash under her arms. This drew, from deep inside her, a grateful sound of mixed pleasure and relief.

  He dried under her arms with a towel, knelt before her, washed her feet, and, gently, began to wash between her legs. She said “Oh!”—playing at being shocked. Mathieu moved the cloth up and down and, after a time, she exhaled a breath of air and said, “Dear me.”

  “Feels good?”

  “Yes, very good. Don’t stop.”

  “Now, now,” he said, teasing her. “This is just to warm you up.” Still on his knees, he washed her loins, then said, “Turn around and bend over, dear.”

  She turned around and bent gracefully from the waist, her hands pressed against the wall. Following the practice of Parisian women, she wore the same style two-piece bathing suit all summer, so that a splendidly white ass shone stark between the dark skin of her thighs and lower back. As he washed, she bent lower, moving a little toward his hand.

  At last he stood and bit her lightly between shoulder and neck, then put his arm around her shoulders, walked her into the bedroom, and lay down beside her on the bed. “I can see that you enjoyed the bath as well,” she said.

  “I did. Something different is always inspiring.”

  “How would you like me?”

  “On your knees, but not yet.”

  Taking his time, he kissed her mouth, then her small breasts, reading her response by the pressure of the hands that gripped his upper arms. After a time, she rested her palm on the top of his head. He understood the signal and did as she wished, worked his way down until his head was between her legs. In the past, this act had needed some time but not now. She shivered briefly and moved away from his mouth. When he looked up at her, she ruffled his hair with her fingers. “You are a tender soul,” she said, adding the name—not Mathieu—that he used at the hotel.

  —

  Later, he turned off the nightstand lamp and, now that the bedroom was dark, he went to the window and opened the blackout drapes. She left the bed and joined him at the window, he put his arm around her, she rested her head below his shoulder, and together they looked out at the stars in the night sky above the city. A few minutes later, as the cold reached him, he said, “Time to get under the covers.”

  As she pulled the quilt up, he took an ashtray from his desk, lit two cigarettes, and joined her. She inhaled and blew smoke from her nostrils, saying, “Mmm.”

  “American cigarettes,” he said. “Black-market cigarettes.”

  “Everybody I know rolls the horrid tobacco they sell now.”

  “I do too, but not tonight. And there’s more to come.”

  “Yes? What is that?”

  “I have a present for you.”

  He had never given her a present, and she turned on her side in order to see his face.

  “The present is in the kitchen, you’ll take it with you in the morning.”

  “I can’t imagine,” she said.

  “Cheese, my love, a big wedge of some kind of Brie, I think, from a dairy farmer down in Provins.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Before the war I loved cheese, all kinds, but, since the Occupation…” The cheese ration dictated by the Occupation Authority was seven ounces a month.

  “I know,” he said. “That’s the way things are, for the moment.”

  She put out her cigarette, laying the remnant carefully on the nightstand, then slid up against him. He finished his own cigarette and, when he turned on his side, she put her arm around his chest and pulled him closer. In a cold world, he thought, there is nothing so warm as a lover next to you in bed. He didn’t think it for long. He’d done a lot that day, then made love, now fell asleep.

  —

  Suddenly he was awake, thinking, What woke me? He groped for his watch on the nightstand, saw that it was three-twenty, then heard the low drone in the distance that grew louder as he listened. Next to him, Joëlle was propped on her elbow. “Do you hear that?”

  “Yes.”

  “They are getting closer.”

  Then the air-raid sirens began to wail.

  The formations of British bombers, headed for Germany, flew over northern France, sometimes near Paris, sometimes not—the RAF tried to vary the flight paths of their aircraft. Paris was blacked out, as the Germans tried to deny navigation aid to their enemy, but they couldn’t black out the moon, which glinted on the rivers and the steel of railroad tracks and led the RAF navigators as they flew toward the industrial cities of the Reich. Now the first searchlight came on, a white disk sweeping back and forth across the sky as the German anti-aircraft batteries hunted for a target. “They are just above us,” Joëlle said. “They’
re not going to bomb Paris, are they?”

  “Not intentionally,” he said.

  Mathieu slipped free of the covers and went to the window, Joëlle followed. It was foolish to stand in front of glass if there was any chance of an explosion, but they stood there anyway. The sound of the RAF formation grew very loud and they could hear the beating of heavy engines overhead. One of the searchlights crisscrossing the sky must have fastened on a bomber because the anti-aircraft batteries stationed on the outskirts of the city opened fire, the sound so loud that it made the floor vibrate. In the sky south of the Seine, little puffs of smoke appeared, harmless looking, but lethal.

  A moment later, a rain of shrapnel began to fall, the steel shreds rattling down on the roofs and streets of the city. When dawn came, the kids of Paris would rush out of their apartments for the hunt, seeking the biggest pieces to add to their shrapnel collections.

  As Mathieu and Joëlle watched the sky, there was a flare in the darkness above the river, then a trail of fire, like a shooting star, crossed the top of the window.

  “Maybe the airmen got out,” Joëlle said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you see parachutes?”

  “I didn’t.”

  A few minutes later, the thunder of the bomber formations faded to a drone and drifted away to the east, the anti-aircraft cannon stopped firing and the searchlights went dark. Mathieu and Joëlle crawled back into bed but there would be no sleeping anytime soon. “I hope the airmen got out. They do, sometimes,” Joëlle said.

  “It’s true.”

  “I know the Germans hunt them down, but some of them escape, and are hidden by people in the countryside until they can be taken across the border into Spain.”

  “Yes,” Mathieu said. “I’ve heard the same thing.”

  “Hold me for a while,” Joëlle said.

  Mathieu wrapped his arms around her.

  —

  16 March, 1941.

  The afternoon local made its way north from Paris toward the village of Beaumont-sur-Oise through a gray springtime mist, close enough to rain that droplets trickled down the windows of the third-class car. Mathieu, sitting on the window side of the wicker seat, stared out at what he could see of the fields passing by. Then the train slowed, barely making way, and the passenger on the aisle side of the seat said, “It always does that here.” Mathieu turned to see a well-dressed man in his thirties, who had a cane propped by his leg.

  “Any special reason?” Mathieu said.

  “The track here was bombed by the Germans last May. It was repaired, but not very well, so the locomotive has to go carefully.”

  “You ride this train often?”

  “I come up here once a month, to see family, then back to Paris the next day. It makes for a change,” he said.

  “Do you work in Paris?”

  “I do. I’m an engineer with the Department of Public Works, in the Bureau of Roads and Bridges. I can’t do as much walking inspection as I did before the war, but I manage.” He patted his leg and said, “War wound, up at the Meuse River.”

  Mathieu nodded. “I was there too. My reserve unit was mobilized in April, just around the time they called up the forty-year-old class. And when the fighting started in May, I was a tank commander until we ran out of ammunition and were ordered to surrender.”

  “Damned sad, that whole business. Which tank?”

  “Renault R-35. Two-man crew, the driver was up front, I stood in the turret, loading and firing the gun, such as it was.”

  “Yes, I know, thirty-seven millimeter, did nothing to the German armour.”

  “A bad tank, no radio, I had to direct the other tanks with hand signals. What a farce, our fuel trucks had wheels instead of treads, so they couldn’t cross the terrain.”

  “Did the Germans let you out of prison camp?”

  “I never went. The Wehrmacht captured so many French soldiers they put us in a soccer stadium, at Charleville-Mézières this was, and, when night came, I made a run for it, with two of my men. The stadium exits weren’t lit, and there was only one guard and some barbed wire, so we distracted the guard, hit him a few times and tied him up, then used his bayonet to loosen the bottom strand of the wire and slid underneath. We spent a night in the woods, walked west when the sun rose, and eventually reached Paris. We thought we’d find an army unit and join up with them but, by then, what was left of the army had retreated to the south. They certainly weren’t in Paris, the city was in chaos. Half the population was out on the roads, trying to get south, trying to get anywhere. What didn’t we see! Ambulances from northern France, farm carts pulled by oxen, fire engines piled with furniture, hearses, one of them carrying a cage full of parrots, monks in robes, riding bicycles.” Mathieu shook his head. “A farce, truly that’s what it was.”

  “A terrible time,” the engineer said. “You see why Pétain had to make a deal, that’s what saved Paris.”

  “Yes, we can thank him for that, not much else.”

  The conversation was veering toward politics and they both sensed it was a subject better avoided. The engineer produced a one-page newspaper and started to read, Mathieu looked out the window and fell back into reverie. When the conductor announced the next stop, the engineer struggled to his feet and, leaning on his cane, took a business card from a leather case and handed it to Mathieu. “My card, monsieur,” he said, then, with difficulty, walked toward the end of the car.

  Mathieu put the card in his pocket. One never knew, but an inspector of roads and bridges might someday be useful.

  —

  A classic March day, the seventeenth; blustery and bright, with a stiff wind that blew the mist away to reveal a rich, sunny sky. In such weather, the old-clothes market in Clichy, up in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, was crowded with Parisians hunting for something, anything, they could wear. It was a tough neighborhood, Clichy, home to the Moulin Rouge nightclub and its cancan, as well as the Place Pigalle—a woman in every doorway with a leer and a suggestion for the men passing by. The old-clothes market took up one side of a street off the Boulevard Clichy, a row of carts piled high with what looked like mounds of tangled rags.

  One of the vendors, who wore a knit cap and had three days’ growth of white beard, watched as a woman approached his cart. What, he wondered, is she doing here? The woman wove her way past the shoppers, carefully, as Parisians in a crowd were determined to go wherever they wanted to go and if you were in the way they might help you, with shoulder or hip, not to be. But nobody pushed this woman. One wouldn’t.

  The woman, who used the nom de guerre Chantal, was, in the proper light, not yet fifty and had the look and bearing of the French upper bourgeoisie: chin up, back straight, complexion slightly roughened as though by time spent outdoors—it would have been no surprise to see her in waxed Barbour jacket, coming out of the woods with a shotgun in the crook of her elbow. Her hair was the color of bronze, worn parted to one side and swept across a noble forehead. She had prominent cheekbones, a determined gaze, a lean body, and spoke a musical, perfect French, spoke directly, with none of the breathless cooing—Oh, monsieur!—of the Parisian flirt. She had dressed for the Clichy market in an iron-gray belted overcoat, a maroon scarf wound into the opening at the top.

  At last, Chantal reached the cart. “Good morning,” she said. “I am told you sell cast-off French army uniforms.”

  “As you see,” the vendor said, waving a hand toward his cart. “Some of them are almost new.”

  “Actually, I would like something worn and tattered, in a small size. I work for a costume department out at the Joinville studios. May I hunt around?”

  You can’t think I’m going to serve you, he thought. “It’s all yours, madame,” he said.

  Patiently, she worked her way through the mound of clothing, which gave off the sour smell of old sweat, with an undertone of something burned. It made her sad to handle these uniforms and to think of the men who had worn them. Chantal came from a military family
and had lost her father, two uncles, and a nephew in the 1914 war, while her estranged husband had disappeared in 1940, was probably in a POW camp in Germany. She hoped he was, she’d always liked him, though he’d been a terrible husband—couldn’t keep his hands off the maids, which had distressed her, thus she couldn’t keep the maids, which distressed her even more.

  She found a soldier’s tunic at the bottom of the pile and tugged at its sleeve until it came loose. Yes, perfect as a disguise, muddy and ripped at the shoulder, but without bullet holes or bloodstains. Now, for the trousers and the shirt. Boots would have to be bought, for a staggering price, on the black market, but Mathieu would take care of this himself. As she held the tunic up for inspection, the vendor said, “You told me you wanted something in sorry shape, well, you’ve got it there.”

  “Perhaps you’ll give me a good price,” Chantal said.

  “Can’t go much lower on any of it, I’m afraid. Plenty cheap as it is.” After a moment he added, “Madame.”

  “Very well. I’ll want the shirt and trousers.”

  The vendor shrugged. “You can have anything in the cart, if you like, and, for a little more, I’ll throw in the cart.”

  Chantal laughed; surely a well-modulated laugh, but uninhibited and joyful. Now the vendor thought, She’s not so bad. “Let me help you, madame,” he said. “I know my way around in that cart.”

  “How very kind of you,” Chantal said.

  —

  Chantal took the uniform—a bundle tied with a string—back to her apartment in the Rue d’Assas, on the far side of the Jardin du Luxembourg, not far from the border of Montparnasse. There she hung it up on two hangers by a partly opened window—if she couldn’t wash it, she could at least air it out. Then she fixed herself a plate of lentils and onions and, with the last of her bread ration for the week, had lunch.