As Shymanski was speaking, Jules had caught a glimpse, almost hidden in the darkness, of a new table in a corner. On it was a stainless steel tray with a neat case of phials and another of syringes. After a moment, Jules said, “I see.” Seconds passed before he asked, “Are you going to paint out the swastika? I can arrange to have it done. Claude won’t do it, because he says he won’t do anything but garden and watch the gate. I can do it.”
“No. Let the new owners paint it out. I’m content to have come full circle.”
1944
IN THE CHAOS before the Wehrmacht drove on Paris in 1940, vehicles and pedestrians rushed in all directions, crossing and weaving pointlessly as they sought salvation in places from which others had fled. Like most of the population, Philippe Lacour had taken to heart the lesson written in his own blood as a young poilu during the Great War, which was that Paris would not fall, or, if so, only after years of fighting. In the perfect June weather, the speed of the German columns and the collapse of the French army seemed both incredible and inappropriate. It was summer, the season of awakened life burgeoning under clear skies and strong sun. Just days before the panic, Philippe and Cathérine had seen young students celebrating their start into life arm in arm in tuxedos and gowns. As usual in June, Philippe, a cellist, had a full schedule of weddings, graduation ceremonies, and parties. As he and Cathérine rode toward the Gare de Montparnasse, in a taxi for which they had paid five times the normal tariff, he was anxious that he would be held to account and lose income for failing to show up at his engagements.
Though expensive, the taxi ride was short. Because everyone in Paris wanted to escape south, the streets were choked so much that half a kilometer from the station the taxi came to a halt. Every sidewalk was packed with people carrying heavy suitcases, many of which were eventually abandoned to thieves. At first they dragged their loot into the side streets and alleys, but soon they began to split open luggage where it had been dropped, struggling over precious items and littering the street with clothing strewn like entrails after a battle.
“People will be fighting to get on the trains, and how many trains will there be?” Philippe asked Cathérine. For him, her dark red hair had never ceased to be a mystery, endlessly deep, endlessly exciting. Now she was in the eighth month of her first pregnancy. He knew that even if they could make their way to the station and onto a train, the journey south might take their unborn child from them, and perhaps the life of the mother as well. And the rumor was that to stop movement south the Germans were strafing rail lines. As the cellist in a chamber quartet that had toured Europe, Philippe had flown in German civil airliners that had been surrogates for the development of military aviation otherwise forbidden to Germany – planes with metal airframes, ribbed sides, and powerful engines. He didn’t merely think of how the Luftwaffe would strafe rolling stock. Rather, he imagined the view from the cockpit as an aircraft easily overtook a train below. He knew that the approach and attack would take only seconds. He saw the steam issuing from the fleeing engine, waving in the wind before disconnecting. He saw the relative motion of aircraft, train, smoke, and steam on and across a landscape of rich green fields, wheat-colored grasses, and blue sky.
“She’s pregnant,” he declared to the taxi driver, who had noticed and taken pity, which is why they had been able to snare his cab. “We can’t fight that,” meaning the crowds and disruption visible through the windshield.
“So what do you want?”
“Go left at the next street. Then take us to the Gare de l’Est.”
“I was there,” the taxi driver told him. “People are pouring in from the Marne and Champagne.”
“The trains going out will be empty.”
“But to where? The Germans?”
“There’ll be a vacuum behind their lines, filled only by supply troops. They’ll focus on what lies ahead.”
“Bird shouldn’t fly into traps.”
“All of France is a trap. For the moment, we’ll take refuge in a neglected corner. If you were a German, would you pay more attention to Paris or Reims?”
The point was made, and the taxi driver grunted in assent. At the sooty Gare de l’Est, the least glorious of Parisian stations, Philippe and Cathérine fought their way against streams of people coming from the east. They had had to leave their suitcases strapped to the roof of the taxi, and now photographs, letters, and records, like their home and their past, were gone forever. Cathérine cried as she walked, but they pushed on, because their lives depended upon it.
All Philippe could think of was to save his wife and child. He had his cello and a briefcase with documents and money. Cathérine had her purse, to which she clung as if it were a child about to be ripped from her arms. In the crowds flowing past were many Jews, some Orthodox, their dress ensuring that they would be in the most danger, and some identifiable mainly to other Jews. Though they were assimilated, their eyes told everything. When Philippe and Cathérine passed them they knew each other for what they were, and it was not just Cathérine’s red hair, for Bretons and others frequently had red hair, but a certain tentative way in the world, always alert as if expecting what always came.
“The Germans will have flushed the Jews from Reims the way beaters clear a field of pheasants. They won’t be looking so hard for them as they will here. Provincial, non-elite troops may not know what to do, or be so inclined.”
“One hopes,” said Cathérine. “But where will we stay?”
“I said Reims because I don’t want to disappoint you, but maybe we can get to Switzerland. Perhaps they would let us in as refugees. I played a concert at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I remember the name of the functionary who took care of us: Von Arx. He was kind, and he may remember me. He wasn’t high-ranking, but that was in thirty-four. Perhaps he’s risen.”
In front of the station, they heard a sound from within like that of a chorus. It was the sound of people in distress, of the past breaking, illusions shattering, and mortality bursting forth from the comfort of ordinary life. It sounded like fire whistling on gusts of air through a burning forest.
Philippe turned to take a last look at Paris. He lifted his gaze to the sky and was astounded to see ragged smoke curling through flawless blue as rich as fresh paint. The smoke was as black and gray as the lines in an etching. Moving both violently and expansively, rising on the wind and racing as if to escape toward the sun, it was composed of the remnants of that which would disappear rather than submit.
IN THE STATION at Reims, open spaces were packed with anxious crowds that had flowed in from the city streets and surrounding countryside. Gustave Doré could not have drawn people stripped more of comfort and assurance. As would his son, Philippe loved sound, and he stopped to listen as the murmur of the crowd floated above them in a cloud. The station was alive with the electric energy of a thousand desperate people: children in arms (somehow they too knew the danger, and their little faces showed it); men charged with the protection of their families; old veterans and their wives, saddened to see war once again; officials who, though trying to do their duty, were beaten back by the panic.
Having discovered that no trains were moving southeast toward Switzerland, Philippe and Cathérine remained calm. Except for them, no one went from the station to the city, and as they walked against the tides the Parisian cellist and his wife felt that, driven by a kind of madness, they had almost left the world of the living. Not knowing where they were going or how they would end up, they persisted in moving toward the danger, suspecting that they were soon going to die.
On the boulevards, some stragglers were hurrying toward the railway, but the side streets were empty. “There are no hotels here,” Cathérine said as they looked down a long residential street half submerged in summer shadow. Brassy light spilled from the cornices and chimneys still illuminated by the sun, with the effect of blackening the darkness where sunlight did not strike.
“The last thing we should do is go to a hotel, becau
se the first thing the Germans will do will be to requisition them for their officers.”
“Then where will we stay? We don’t know anyone here.”
“We’ll ask.” From the north and northeast came the muted sound of distant artillery. “We have perhaps a day, certainly hours. We’ll find something.” He wasn’t half as sure as he wanted to sound for Cathérine’s sake.”
They walked farther into the shadows. Halfway down the last of several streets later, they came to a storefront: Patisserie Boulangerie Mignon. Though it was closed, Philippe saw variations of light coming from a room in the back, as if there were a fire or someone were moving about and blocking or reflecting the light of a lamp. He knocked on the glass-paned door.
“They’re closed,” Cathérine said. “They get up in the dark to bake.”
“Someone is moving inside.” He rapped on the glass respectfully but urgently. They could hear heavy engines – perhaps of tanks or half-tracks. “I thought we had hours,” Philippe said. “We don’t.”
No one came. “Oh God,” Cathérine exclaimed as she saw, at the end of the street, the first vehicles leading an endless column of half-tracks, command cars, and trucks speeding past the gap straight into the sun.
Philippe rested his cello on the sidewalk and put his arms around his wife. The convoy at one end of the street was now matched by the lead vehicles of a similar column at the other end. As minutes passed, thousands of transports, artillery pieces, and tanks went by unceasingly. These were only part of an immense, overwhelming power stretching toward Paris. Philippe had seen such things as a soldier in the Great War, but to Cathérine they were new.
The glass door opened. Standing inside, his left hand still controlling the door lever – for he had yet to imagine much less make up his mind about what might be asked of him – was a short man in his fifties, with graying hair, a mustache of the same coloration, and a white apron, its strings loosely hanging parallel with the pinstripes of his gray pants.
This was Louis Mignon, thrice-wounded veteran of the previous war, baker, chef, deeply devout Catholic, husband of Marie, father to Jacques, and savior of Philippe Lacour, Cathérine Lacour, and their unborn child, Jules.
RISKING EVERYTHING HE had, the great-grandfather of Marie Druart Mignon had bought the building during a nineteenth-century financial panic, and now it was hers, three storeys above a shop, a steep Mansard roof with no windows on the street but three louvered vents where dormers might have been. One small dormer window looked out over the back garden, and in the twenties, when business was good, Louis had had a bathroom installed, even before a staircase, when the main plumbing stack had to be redone and the contractor suggested that they take the opportunity to prepare the attic for future habitation.
Hearing trucks and armored vehicles, Louis brought Philippe and Cathérine in quickly, closed and locked the door, and peered out the window, to left and right. “They’re not coming down this street,” he said. He stared at his guests. “Is she Jewish?” he asked Philippe. There was no hostility. It was a necessary question. Cathérine was beautiful, her face and deep red hair different somehow from the faces and deep red hair of the women of Brittany and Normandy. One could tell.
“We both are,” Philippe answered.
“You look Dutch. I would swear you were Dutch.” Philippe was tall and blonde. “You could pass for German. You’re not a German?”
Philippe shook his head to indicate that he wasn’t. “We were Dutch a long time ago before we came to France. There are many Dutch Jews.”
“What do you expect of me?” Louis asked.
“Nothing.”
“Do you have someplace to go?”
“No.”
“Not a temple, or other Jews? They say Jews always come out on top.”
“Yes, of course, like us.”
“You don’t take care of your own?”
“We would if we could. Right now, the richest, most powerful Jews in Paris are headed toward the Pyrenees, maybe walking on the road. Some may have diamonds sewn into their clothes, but that won’t help us here.”
“What will happen if the Germans see you?”
“I don’t know. They don’t like Jews of course, and although it’s not written on my face, I killed some Germans in Fourteen-Eighteen.”
Louis now looked at him in a different light. “I killed them, too,” he said. “You’ve come from Paris?” He could hear it in Philippe’s speech.
“This afternoon.”
“Why here if you don’t know anyone?”
“The trains were empty in this direction, and we thought we might get to Switzerland.”
“No,” Louis said. “Everything’s shut down.”
At this point Jacques and Marie descended from the floor above. “Who are they?” Marie asked. She was a little shorter than her husband, with wavy blonde hair. Jacques – seventeen, thin, tall, and dark – saw the arrival of the Lacours as messengers of what life was going to be like. He had already adapted, and for him it was an adventure.
In answer to his wife’s question, Louis Mignon said, “They’re Jews from Paris. We have to put them in the attic. The hatch is in the ceiling of the closet, and if we stuff the shelf with duvets you won’t be able to see the opening. We’ll have plenty of food, because the Germans will make us bake for them and we can siphon off whatever these two ….” He glanced at Cathérine, “these three, need.”
Marie thought about this, completely unafraid. “But the Germans will be here for bread and pastry every day.”
“That’s good,” Louis told her. “It’ll be as if it’s their own. They’ll be happy each time they take away what we bake, and they’ll never look here because for them it will be pleasant and familiar. If I could, I’d hide Jews across the street from wherever the Germans will have their headquarters. Jacques,” his father commanded, “get the ladder.” Everyone was enthusiastic, as if they were embarking on something that would neither be difficult nor last long.
MARIE MIGNON DELIVERED Jules as Philippe paced on the other side of a sheet hung as a barrier in the dimly lit attic. Philippe was puzzled, disarmed, and made superfluous by the feminine power and mystery of bearing and bringing forth new life. Jules cried for only a few seconds when he first came into the world. As if he had understood, he suddenly stopped. For four years, silence came naturally at first, then in imitation, and then as a game in which sound, though desired above all else except freedom, was the enemy. They didn’t flush the toilet or bathe unless the shop was closed and the Mignons kept watch, ready to knock with a broomstick against the ceiling of the third floor, as a signal to stop. Even when he was hurt or fell with a shock, Jules hardly cried, or when he did it was nearly silent, a disciplined gasping, then tears and nearly inaudible short breaths. For four years, like his parents, he didn’t speak, but only whispered, and didn’t know that his and their voices could be full, clear, and less like wind gently whistling through imperfections in the window frames of an old house.
Philippe fingered the strings of his cello and moved his right hand – always entrancing to Jules – as if he were holding the bow that he left in the case so as not to be too tempted. Though Philippe could hear the music as if it were actually sounding, Jules could not, but he saw clearly that his father was lifted into a different world that shone on his face and showed in his motions.
Little Jules would try to go there, too, moving his own imaginary bow with great seriousness. For his father and mother this was wonderful to see. “Someday,” Philippe told him, “you’ll learn to do this with a real bow, and with sound.”
“When?” Jules had whispered.
“Someday.”
The sounds that the child did hear came from the street and neighboring houses: engines, hawkers’ cries, orders commanded through German loudspeakers, thunder, rain and hail on the roof, birdsong, the wind, water running in pipes, muted conversation and laughter, and, eventually, artillery and bombs – bombs on the railheads, bombs on brid
ges, bombs in the city. The Lacours could never go to the basement during a bombing, where anyone on the street, including German soldiers, SS, even Gestapo, might take shelter. But as time wore on and the Germans didn’t show, Louis Mignon suggested that if the bombardments grew heavy enough it might be worth the risk.
For his first four years Jules knew nothing but one big, brown room, with raw, unfinished wood making up the steep ceiling, the knee walls, the beams, and the floor. A taut bedsheet on a wood frame cordoned off his parents’ ‘bedroom,’ where, when Jules was deep asleep, they made love in complete silence except for not-quite-silent, astounded breaths. Perhaps having heard this in his dreams, for the rest of his life, try as he might, no matter how abandoned his lovemaking, Jules was never able to utter an exclamation, a cry, a groan, or a single word.
They had no artificial light, because even with blackout curtains it might have shown through a fissure in the walls or vents. Thus, their hours were decided by the sun, and when the days grew short and the nights so long they couldn’t sleep through them, they whispered in the dark. They dared not look out their one window when it was light, so the only part of the outside world Jules knew other than a pinched view of the street through the louvers of the vents was the back garden in moonlight. Because the city was blacked out, he hadn’t even been able to see warm lamps in beckoning windows.
Although light came through the window in the day – had it not, they would have lived just like bats instead of almost like bats – Jules thought the world was much darker than it is. He thought the moon was the sun, something he was not allowed to see in the day, when, in his particular cosmology, for some reason the “moon” grew much brighter. The most beautiful things he had ever beheld were the beginnings of sunrise and the reflected remnants of sunset, especially when one or the other struck new copper flashing on a distant roof or steeple and the reflection of what he thought was the moon in its excitable state shot through the darkness of the attic, illuminating white, dancing dust in its beam and painting a portion of the sloping roof in blinding gold. The first time he saw the sun itself he was knocked back in shock, and his father, who was holding him up to the window as he himself stood on a chair, nearly toppled over. In the spring of 1943, a few months after most of the 226 Jews of Reims who had been flushed out of their hiding places had been sent east to die, he saw moonlight on a tree in the back garden when it bloomed into a fixed white cloud that winked on and off as the true clouds above it hid and revealed the light.