The Postmistress of Paris(14)

A shopgirl from a nearby boutique joined them, watching silently, a large silk bow smartly tied to her standard-issue gas mask. Nanée too had a gas mask. An air raid shelter had been set up in the basement of her building, and in T’s as well. They’d all gotten used to throwing on their bathrobes and trooping down to join their neighbors, politely shaking hands and saying good evening. In Nanée’s building, the concierge had at first served coffee and soup, and they chatted until the all-clear signal. But as the nights dragged on with the same sirens and no actual war arriving, fewer of her neighbors bothered, and eventually Nanée too simply pulled the covers up over her head. “The Phony War,” they’d started calling it. But now it was real.

“No miracle is coming, T,” Nanée said, serious now. “Even the soldiers retreating to safety aren’t stopping here.”

“How will Danny find us if we leave?” T whispered.

Nanée lifted Peterkin and tucked his head to her chest. “Everyone who made it out of Dunkirk is in England.”

“But what if he didn’t?”

Nanée tried to convey with a look words she couldn’t say, that if Danny wasn’t in England, he wasn’t anywhere.

“Hitler will restore order,” the shopgirl said. “It will be best for France.”

Nanée wanted to take the little ninny to task, but there were far too many like her to take them all on.

She asked a passing soldier, a boy with a bandaged eye, where he’d come from.

“France is lost,” he answered. “The German Panzers—”

“Yes, but where?”

“Up near Abbeville.”

She said to T, “That’s not a hundred miles away. The Germans took all of Denmark in four hours.”

“No. Danny wouldn’t be able to find us.”

“But you have to think of Peterkin, T. Danny would want you to get your son out of danger. You have to think of your child.”





Thursday, June 6, 1940





CAMP DES MILLES


Darkness, and the sounds of prisoners in restless sleep—barking coughs, snores, sleep-talking—interrupted by the rising signal, the bugler playing beautifully, as always. Edouard leaped from his straw mat, pulled on the bare overhead bulb, dressed as he said a quick good morning to the young Luki in his photo, and took the wooden stairs by twos to get outside. Hell. A long line already waited for the seven filthy latrines, men as thin and ill-kempt as he was, despite their best efforts. Others stood in nightclothes and nightcaps, debating in whispers; they’d been here for hours. It was crazy, all these refugees, anti-Nazi to a man, locked up as “enemy subjects” for no reason other than xenophobia and administrative incompetence. It was so absurd that it would make you a Surrealist if you weren’t one already. Even Max Ernest, who’d been released in November with some of the more famous internees, had been brought back some weeks before, as if the approach of the German army might make the men here more dangerous to France, when in fact holding them captive simply made France more dangerous for them. Max had no answer to why he’d gone home to the Ardèche rather than fleeing France when he could have; it was so hard to imagine things could get worse until they actually did.

Edouard passed the time in line practicing English with another man, a way of looking forward, imagining that a future might exist in which all of France wouldn’t fall to Hitler. The armored cars and motorcycles on the road beyond the gates—were they going toward the fight, or retreating? “My Luki is in Paris with a friend,” he said to his line mate. He’d just received a letter from her the day before, this one not written by Berthe describing how Luki was doing but a few words in big loopy letters, with the K backward and numbers better formed. I love you, Papa, Luki had written, and she’d included a drawing of him with her on his shoulders, the way he often carried her to and from the dreaming log back in Sanary-sur-Mer. He’d slept with the letter beside him. He had it in his pocket now. “Luki is just learning to read and write,” he said, swallowing back the sadness of Berthe rather than Elza or him teaching her. “She has a laugh like sheet lightning,” he said. “She likes to pretend. She questions everything, like her mother did.”

Just as he reached the front of the latrine line, several guards stepped in front of him. There was nothing to do but wait.

Some twenty guards were marching into the courtyard as Edouard emerged from the stinking latrine, the internees gathering for the morning roll call. Everyone stood bored as a sergeant in a red fez called numbers and they answered. “One?” “One.” “Two?” “Two.” “Four?” “Four.” Lucky number three had been released in the fall and left France before the spring roundups.

Foreign legionnaires carrying barrels of latrine refuse across the courtyard set them down for a minute to rest. “Ice cream! Get your ice cream!” one of them shouted. They alone laughed.

“One hundred thirty-two?” the guard called finally.

Edouard replied, “One hundred thirty-two.”

Back inside, Max Ernst smoothed his dirty white hair over his balding head, then ladled coffee from a bucket on which a thin layer of reddish dust had already settled. Edouard, holding his now-hot tin cup gingerly, dipped his bread and took a bite.