Immediately upon Jacques’ report of what the Resistance knew about the deportations of the spring, the Mignons had refined their already ingenious system. They would eat their meals and clean up before delivering food to the attic. Thus, when the Lacours had finished and the dishes were brought down, there would never be two sets that might cast suspicion. Jacques would keep watch during the passages. Working for the Resistance, he, like everyone in the house, was always in danger. Philippe regretted every day that he could not risk for the Mignons what they risked for him. He asked if he could participate in the actions that Jacques reported, taking the boy’s place as the obligation of an adult and a veteran. He knew how to use weapons and how to fight. But no, it was out of the question. He couldn’t move on the street. Even with false documents he would have been conspicuously out of place as he left and returned to the Mignons, passing Wehrmacht and SS troops and officers who, despite their military discipline, were as weak as anyone else in the face of baguettes and the famous biscuits rose de Reims, the scarce ingredients for the latter made available to a rather nervous Louis by an SS officer who, had he known what the Mignons were doing, would have executed the whole family without so much as a thought, rapidly delivering pistol shots to the backs of their heads.
The scheme required that even laundry be matched, so that though Cathérine was thinner than Marie, nothing came down to be washed unless it could be plausibly worn by one Mignon or another. Jules’ clothes never came down but were laundered with many of Cathérine’s in the bathroom sink, and part of his play was silently kneading them in the water.
In the four years spent in their dark brown room, the things that take up time in a normal life were absent: work, play, shopping, travel, amusements, promenades, visits, appointments. Instead, they read, they dreamed of life after the war, they whispered about what they remembered and loved, and they taught Jules, who as a result of this upbringing was unusually precocious. All day long, they read to him until he himself could read. Forced by circumstance and lack of choice, starting at age three, he read everything passed up through the hatch: Victor Hugo, Molière, even Voltaire, none of which he actually understood, but he loved the sound of the words. His parents taught him the rudiments of musical theory, promising that when it would be filled out with sound he would know one great day after another. Even if it were beyond his comprehension, he was nearly force-fed a child’s version of mathematics, philosophy, history, and the sad story of their lives, things young children are not normally required to learn unless compelled to by half-insane parents, or war. There was little else they could do with sixteen hours a day of enforced idleness made otherwise only by learning, talking, and dreaming. And always the drills and the crucial game, which taught Jules how instantly to stop his play and freeze in place without even putting down a foot that had been raised, except so softly he could not hear it himself. Despite what they told him, he thought that this and all the other unusual things were normal. He was happy despite his parents’ unhappiness, because he was with them, and because they loved him so much and so well. This was his world, but then, in August of 1944, it ended.
THE SPRING OF ’44 had been unusually hot and dry, and in June as the Allies fought through the hedgerows and all of France breathed expectation, the weather was unlike anything anyone had seen before. The heat beneath the copper roof in the attic was difficult to withstand. Three vents and the open window facing the garden were not enough to exhaust the air, so Philippe would open the hatch to get a convection current going. It worked so well that the column of rising air was enough to push back Cathérine’s hair when she looked down into the third-floor closet. They closed their eyes and imagined it was a sea wind. In Reims, no less than the rest of France, a heat wave arrived in August just ahead of the advancing American troops. By the time Patton’s Third Army had pressed the Germans into the city, it abated as if in deference to the expected battle.
On the 16th, the kind of immense convoys that in 1940 had carried the Germans west through Reims now flowed east in even greater volume, for, unlike as in the advance four years previously, the routes of retreat were constricted because, battered in the north, the Germans lost them there. They poured into Reims day and night in a cross between panic and military rigor. Now they didn’t merely course down the avenues, leaving only a small part of their mass to garrison the town as they pushed toward Paris, they stopped. There were so many that they had to splay into the lesser streets, which quickly filled with bumper-to-bumper military vehicles, field kitchens puffing smoke, tense and camouflaged soldiers, and defensive positions at key points replete with sandbagged revetments and emplaced anti-tank guns, the infamous 88s, pointing down the boulevards or across the squares to cover fields of fire.
The troops on the Mignons’ street looted the bakery in the first half hour, taking flour, sugar, and butter, and from then on the Mignons were unable to go out to replenish. Not much remained anywhere else anyway, except what they could beg of the bivouacked Germans. They had as much water as they needed, the heat had abated, Jacques dared not leave the house, and everyone was more or less still and waiting. At dusk when the shadows made it impossible from the street to see into the vents, Philippe looked out and reported. “There are almost a thousand German soldiers here. Trucks, half-tracks, armored cars. No tanks. We would have heard them anyway. There are four field kitchens belching smoke.” Later, the Mignons brought some German rations – potatoes and a small block of cheese – to the Lacours.
As the week passed, the troops in the street would suddenly pack up and leave, only to be replaced by a new column that choked the same space with nearly identical vehicles and equipment. The sounds of arrival and departure were always the same: straps slapping against metal, engines starting, tripods folding, the slides and bolts of weapons exercised after oiling, commands shouted, and, upon leaving, the blast of a whistle followed by the revving of engines as the vehicles rolled off. Each wave would rap on the door of the bakery and demand supplies. Told that they were gone, the corporals assigned to scavenge made forced inspections. Some wanted to check the upper floors for hidden food. This was highly suspenseful, but Marie Mignon, an honest woman of great maternal authority, would inform them that the first formation had taken everything. “We have only what you give us now,” she would say, truthfully. “Otherwise, we’d starve. We can’t move. There are three of us. We’ve hardly eaten in a week.”
Then came a pause in the retreat. Some units moved back into the city from the east, and those pouring in from the west ceased to depart. In all, twenty-five thousand infantry took up positions in and around the city. The encampment below now had another kind of energy, higher and quieter, as the soldiers made preparations for battle. Communications lines were run from newly established headquarters to numerous subsidiary commands in freshly requisitioned buildings. Chevraux de frises blocked streets bristling with 88s and machine gun revetments. Artillery battalions fell into line within range of the Marne, and what was likely a substantial proportion of the remains of the Luftwaffe, two flights of forty fighter planes apiece – or perhaps one passing over twice: no one knew – buzzed the city, as if to fool the waiting troops into false confidence.
One evening during the buildup, Louis Mignon poked his head above the hatch to confer with Philippe. Both had been at Verdun, and they feared that Reims was about to be leveled by bombing, artillery, or both. They decided that when the bombardment began the Lacours would go to the basement together with the Mignons. The Lacours would be cousins from Paris, and their papers would have been left upstairs in the rush to take shelter. Perhaps no Germans would come into the basement. Perhaps even if some did they would not query anyone as they waited out the attack. What a pity it would be if, only days before the liberation of Reims, either the Lacours would be discovered or they and the Mignons would be blown to bits, their flesh and blood mixed with that of the Germans who had driven them into hiding. Civilians who could, fled to the chalk caves beneat
h Reims famous for holding the major portion of the world’s aging Champagne. The Mignons – father, mother, and son – had decided that rather than abandon their guests they would live or die with them. But on Saturday, the 26th of August, the telephone lines that had just been run were re-spooled, the German generals mounted their elegant, nickel-trimmed cars and drove off before dawn, and their formations followed in the light. Reims had been so filled with men and material that it took two days and nights of steady movement to empty it. The Germans completely lost control on the 28th, and those remaining were confronted by the Resistance and an advance guard of Free French. By the evening of the 29th, American tanks were on the outskirts of the city, and would drive for the center just before sunrise on the 30th.
That morning, crowds surged through the streets and into the main squares. The Tricolor was unfurled everywhere. Jacques went out and returned, triumphant and elated, to report that there had been only minor skirmishes and few killed. It was over. Nonetheless, here and there small German units had been trapped or were lost. Some had only now arrived from the south, having made a hook after retreating from Paris. No one knew how many, but it was certain that these were very few and that they were trying to flee via inconspicuous routes before the main roads east were blocked by the Americans.
“What’s that?” Jules had asked, hearing the faint strains of the Marseillaise. For fear that it might somehow, in a circumstance they could hardly imagine, give him away, he hadn’t been taught it.
“That’s the Marseillaise,” Cathérine told him. “It’s the song of France. They’re singing because they’re happy the Germans have gone away.” Having whispered for four years, she whispered still.
As she spoke, Philippe sat down and pivoted his cello into position, but this time he held the bow. This time, he would play music sounded out. And now Jules would hear music not through walls or at a distance or in the abstract.
It would have been appropriate to play the Marseillaise, but it was not what Philippe chose. He wanted the first music his son would hear to reflect not a secular glory but something more powerful. Philippe chose instead the choral part of a Bach cantata, which before the war he had transcribed and which he heard, despite the lack of sound, almost every day of their confinement – Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren. Even to a Jew hiding in Reims in 1944, that it was Christian and that it was German was of no consequence, for it had been written as if in divine light, it was perfect, it was joy expressed through mourning, like the darkest clouds when lit by radiant beams. It was as if a mother were singing her last song to her child, confident that, like her love, the melody was invincible and would endure. Hearing music close and immediately for the first time, Jules was astounded, and loved it so that he knew that this was what he would follow for the rest of his life.
But he was not the only one who was moved. The cello had sufficient power to pour forth from the vents and fill the street immediately below, where, at first not hearing it, as the Lacours and the Mignons had not heard them, a detachment of Germans in three command cars and a half-track had come to a halt so as to listen carefully to the movement of armor in the distance. Like hunters in the forest, the SS troops and their commander, splintered from the barbarous 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division Götz Von Berlichingen, froze, cocked their heads, and strained to determine the location of what they were hearing. The unmistakable rumble of tanks came from the northwest, quite far away. This they could tell if only because they were themselves part of an armored division, from which they had been separated, serving in Paris for two months. They wanted to stay away from the tanks above all, although they knew that PIATs or heavy machine guns could at any moment and from any redoubt or casual position do them in almost as well.
They heard an ocean-like hiss of crowds to the north and east. These, too, were an obstacle, although a way through them could be cleared with a few bursts of fire. And everywhere, they could hear the Marseillaise, played from many sources and therefore with a dissonance that was intolerably irritating to the fifteen hardened soldiers seeking escape through backstreets. In their silence – listening, still, stiff and straight – they accurately conformed to their image of themselves. They were self-contained, stoic, and ruthless. They had deliberately ceased long before to wonder about war and death so as to be hardened and unafraid. War was now a duty that, were it not necessary to be highly agile and alert, they would have conflated, even in its most savage parts, with tedium. When they did fight, they fought bravely, efficiently, and without emotion of any kind.
Nonetheless, the retreat had taken an invisible toll. The reality of loss and defeat had opened to them. In a surge of the kind of feeling so often coupled with resignation, they experienced a vision of – and an intense love for – the things of the world. Thus, standing absolutely straight in the lead vehicle, face turned to the sky as he listened for what he had stopped to hear, the major in command was moved, for the first time in a long time, by the music coming from above. For so long having denied himself such feeling, he decided that he would compliment the cellist, not only for his skill, but for being sagacious and catholic enough to play Bach at the moment of liberation, when probably no one else in France was playing anything but the Marseillaise or would dare play anything German. The major was greatly and uncharacteristically softened by this. He wanted to be kind, to give a gift, to share with whoever was playing the music, which he recognized exactly, the admission that they were in fact brothers, that the war would be over, that there were higher things.
He dismounted. Shadowed automatically by a corporal and a private each armed not as he was with a pistol but with a submachine gun, he went to the bakery. Not surprisingly, it was closed, but with his riding crop he rapped hard on the door. He expected to be received, and that someone would appear expressly to receive him. One thing he did not lack was authority. The glass nearly broke.
The sound of this startled the Mignons as they were gathered around the radio, listening for news of their liberation. Keeping himself hidden behind the curtains, Louis looked out the window. Then he backed into the room. “Germans,” he said. “They’re right there.” As the radio was switched off and the dial turned from the BBC, he heard the cello for the first time since the Lacours had been hidden. It was beautiful, and for an instant he noted that, but then signaled Jacques to run upstairs and silence it. As Louis went downstairs to answer the door, Jacques raced upstairs and knocked with a broom handle against the ceiling. The cello stopped instantly, and Jules held position as in the game he had learned from his beginnings.
Louis was used to officers, who came often to the bakery – but not so much to the SS. Perhaps his fear showed, although what fear he had was largely neutralized by his natural courage and discipline, the knowledge that Reims was very nearly liberated, and the conviction that the war would end with Germany prostrate. For the moment, however, he could not let this confidence show. In the last act, all they had to do was get through, just as they had come through four years of war and occupation. These were only the few remaining minutes. The major was smiling. It was obvious that he meant no harm.
“I want to compliment the musician,” he said, “not only for his talent but especially for playing German music.”
“Thank you,” Louis said. “I’ll tell him.”
Still benevolent and unsuspecting, the major said, “I’d like to tell him myself, if I can.” He was polite.
“I’ll get him,” Louis announced.
“No no no,” the major insisted, wanting to save him the trouble. Here, the indelible habit of absolute authority took over. “I’ll go myself.” He started up the stairs, untroubled by the impoliteness of doing so without invitation. His men followed, and the stairs creaked with their weight.
Louis had no idea what would happen. He waited, thinking that this might be the end for them all. He heard the major encounter Jacques descending from the third floor. “Are you the cellist?”
“Yes,” Jacques answered. I
t was not convincing.
“What moved you to play the Wach Auf?”
“It’s beautiful,” said Jacques, who didn’t know that this was not the piece Philippe had played.
“Really,” the major said, having changed in an instant. He pushed past Jacques to the third floor. The soldiers flipped off the safeties on their weapons. Looking around, with the pleasure of a hunter, the major asked, “Where’s the cello?” Jacques had no answer. He thought that so near the end of the war for Reims, he was going to die, and that he would be unable to protect his parents, who were going to die as well. He hoped they had fled, but knew that while he was in danger they would not.
The major looked at the ceiling just as he had looked at the sky a short time before, but now he felt betrayed, and he was angry. “What’s up there?” he demanded.
“Nothing. It’s a crawlspace. Too small to enter.”
“I saw the vents and the pitch of the roof,” the major said. He was both driven and led as if in the chase. The corporal opened the closet door and pulled out duvets and bedding, tossing them over his head. Then he announced that he had found a hatch.
Without an order, the private went over to the corporal, cupped his hands into a stirrup, steadied himself, and gave the corporal a boost to the closet shelf. The corporal then used the barrel of his gun to knock open the hatch, and poked his head through just as Louis had frequently done. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw the sad, improvised furniture of the attic, the cello, the bow, Philippe, and Cathérine – but not Jules, who had been told to hide among the beams where the bathroom had been built against the rear knee wall, and, as in all the games, had obediently done so.