The Postmistress of Paris(45)

“How am I to arrange for no one to watch a woman like you?” the guard protested.

“I’ve taken care of that.”

He stared at her. He saw his predicament. She might have felt sorry for him, but he was a Frenchman who knew how these men were forced to live, and would do nothing to help them. He would not even enter the space where they slept.

She touched her hand to her lips, the signal to Max, who was now headed out to the yard with the other men.

He nodded. Yes, he’d seen.

“All right, then,” she said to the guard. “You’re going to take me to collect my case from the guardhouse and get me as near as you can to the gate without me seeming to be leaving.”

She took his arm, and he fell in beside her, heading out of the factory building.

“You will not punish the men who are going to save your skin with what they are about to do,” she said. “You will persuade the commandant or the other guards or anyone else you need to persuade that you will deal with them, and if I hear so much as the faintest suggestion that they suffered any ill treatment, I will visit your commandant again. Do you understand?”

His Adams’s apple bobbed in his throat. Desire and fear, they nestle so closely together in a weak man.

They entered the guardhouse, collected her overnight case, and emerged on the other side, nearer the gate. Max, watching from the line of brick-movers, saw her. A moment later he was swinging a fist at the fellow from the mat beside his in that filthy indoor space, just as they’d arranged. Everyone turned toward the fight, the other guards moving to intervene.

The guard with Nanée opened the gate, and she slipped out, with Edouard Moss’s papers if not with the man himself.





Sunday, November 3, 1940





VILLA AIR-BEL


Nanée stood with her little suitcase in hand in her bedroom, finally, Dagobert licking her shoes, her ankles.

“It’s okay, Daggs,” she said. “I’m fine.”

But she couldn’t muster even the energy to pet him.

She’d slipped as quietly as she could into Villa Air-Bel, not wanting to answer anyone’s questions about the camp or the long train ride back, showing the conductor only her American passport and her ticket and holding her breath, smiling innocently as he considered—Did she have no travel permit? And why was she only getting on at Les Milles with a ticket from Arles?—before he punched her ticket without question and moved on to the next passenger.

She closed her bedroom door and lit a fire in the fireplace, then stood watching it, soothed by Dagobert’s busy tongue.

“It’s okay,” she said again, as much to herself as to him.

When the logs were caught, she set her case on the dresser and popped it open. She looked at herself in the mirror there, the dark circles under her eyes. She adjusted her scarf to better cover the deepening purple mark.

The panties and brassiere and blouse with the still-damp sleeve sat crumpled in the case, on top of the Robert Piguet suit.

She looked in the mirror again. It was his shame, not hers. Robe Heir.

She took the blouse out and set it on the fire, watched it slowly catch. Dagobert sat beside her, watching too. She added the panties, the brassiere. She took the silk stockings still attached to the garter out of the case next, tossed them too into the fire. Good silk stockings. Impossible to get these days. They seemed to shrink from the flames, giving off an odor of foul charred meat.

She stared at the suit. Somehow, the suit was the worst of it.

She’d just taken the jacket in hand when someone tapped lightly at the door.

“I’ll be down in a bit,” she said.

The door creaked open. T cautiously peered in. “Nanée, don’t forget Miriam is leaving tomorrow.”

Nanée tried to say of course she hadn’t forgotten, but of course she had. This was Miriam’s last night before she left for Yugoslavia, to try to get her fiancé back to the States.

“Nanée?” T said, registering the blouse in the fire, the stockings.

“I’ll be down to help get ready for the party in a minute.”

T took the suit jacket gently from Nanée’s hands. “Wait, Nanée. Just wait.”

“I’ll never wear it again.”

Even she could hear the anger in her voice.

T held the jacket out and examined it, the diamond brooch still on the lapel. She looked to Nanée—that frank, assessing gaze.

“Edouard wasn’t there,” Nanée said.

“Oh, Nan.” T moved toward her, but Nanée stepped back. She couldn’t bear to have anyone touch her.

T collected the skirt from the case and folded the two pieces carefully. She stood there holding them, watching the blouse and the stockings burn. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

Obsession. Anxiety. Fetish. But Nanée would never tell anyone. She couldn’t have even T imagining this.

“What’s to tell?” she said, embracing her rage. “I failed.”

T set the suit aside and took Nanée’s hand the way she did with Peterkin. Nanée wanted to object, but she didn’t want to explain. She let T lead her to the little chair and sit her down.

“You’re exhausted,” T said. “Of course you are. It was a long trip, and you never have been any good at not getting exactly what you want. But you tried.”