Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

Except for the German occupiers, Paris had become a city of women. Everywhere Genevieve looked, she saw women queuing in line, hurrying along sidewalks, pedaling away on bicycles, crammed into buses, staffing cafés and shops and working at every imaginable job, all against a backdrop of soldiers in the ubiquitous gray-green uniform.

A large portion of France’s men had lost their lives in the Great War. The new generation of Frenchmen had either gone off to fight, been imprisoned or killed as France fell, or had fallen victim to the Service du travail obligatoire. The STO swept up hundreds of thousands of workers and sent them to Germany as forced labor to compensate for the lost manpower of the soldiers at the front. By and large, the only French males left were either too young or too old for combat, or were members of the Milice, or, like Max, had been deemed medically unfit.

The city itself had turned Kafkaesque: the familiar distorted in a way that was almost nightmarish. The clocks had been set back an hour, so that Paris ran on Berlin time. The streets were quiet, as the usual traffic noises were greatly reduced because of the shortage of gasoline. Hunger was rampant. The average Parisian had lost more than a stone of weight since the Germans had taken over. Everything from food to clothing to medicine was almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to obtain. What little was available required a coupon to purchase, giving rise to a flourishing black market. Signs in German above the cafés spoke to the occupiers: Wehrmachts Speiselokal; Soldatenkaffee.

Sudden noises—sirens, screams, the pounding of running feet, the droning of aeroplane engines overhead—produced an exaggerated fear reaction in a traumatized population conditioned to expect calamity. In this new reality, disaster could, and often did, overtake anyone at any time.

From 1942, Jews had been forced to wear a six-pointed yellow star on their clothing so that they could be easily identified, and they were singled out for the harshest possible treatment. In the windows of nearly every commercial establishment hung signs that read Les Juifs Ne Sont Pas Admis Ici—No Jews Allowed Here. The statut des Juifs banned Jews from any kind of civil, commercial or industrial job. Jewish-owned businesses almost without exception had fallen victim to Aryanization, the forced transfer to non-Jewish owners. Jewish artists were not allowed to perform, and it was forbidden to sing songs by Jewish composers or stage plays by Jewish playwrights. Books authored by Jews were banned or burned. The arrests had begun by targeting foreign-born Jews. Then the horror that was the Vél d’Hiv roundup resulted in more than thirteen thousand Jews being forced without warning from their Paris homes and confined in the stadium for days before being shipped off to German internment camps. From that time, more were arrested every day, and those few who remained lived in fear. Drancy was a name to strike dread into the souls of those for whom it loomed as a constant threat. Its prisoners were regularly packed into trains bound for Germany to serve as forced labor in the work camps. Whispers that the trains—that the majority of France’s Jews—were really bound for death camps were rife, but no one seemed to know for sure. Or if they knew, they were too afraid to speak openly.

The Nazis reigned supreme. Red, black and white swastika flags adorned iconic monuments and public buildings. Across the front of the National Assembly building a huge banner hung that read Deutschland Siegt An Allen Fronten!—Germany Is Victorious on All Fronts! The Germans had set up their headquarters in the Le Meurice on the rue de Rivoli right in front of the Tuileries Gardens. The Wehrmacht regularly goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées.

Outwardly Paris was still Paris, her beauty largely untouched by war. But her gay, bright, defiant spirit—her joie de vivre—had been stolen. The City of Light had turned drab and gray—and afraid.

After paying off the bicycle taxi she’d hired, Genevieve took the metro to the Montparnasse train station. The platform was packed shoulder to shoulder: soldiers, schoolchildren, clergy, tourists, many women armed like her with shopping bags as they sought to leave the city in an effort to obtain items that rationing had put out of reach. Food was limited to a maximum of eighteen hundred calories per person per day, fewer for children and the elderly. The allocation of meat was a scant six and a half ounces a week, and still it was almost impossible to obtain. Poultry, eggs, cheese and vegetables were more easily acquired in the countryside. French policemen, the Milice, their allegiance pledged to the occupiers, roamed the crowds, eyeing first this one and then that one with suspicion, demanding to see papers as they chose. Undercover officers of the Geheime Feldpolizei, the Wehrmacht’s secret military police, could be anywhere, searching for spies.

In Berthe’s shapeless, oversize coat, with the shabby scarf pulled well forward to hide her face, Genevieve attracted no notice. She was simply one among the crowd.

Careful to keep her head down, she boarded one of the last cars—the very last car was designated Jews only and the platform had a separate cordoned-off section for them to wait—and took a seat beside a window. A tired-looking woman and her adult daughter sat down next to her, talking in hushed voices about the younger woman’s husband, apparently interned in a POW camp in Germany, and the hardships facing her and their two young children with him gone.

The car continued to fill up until people were sitting in the aisle and no more could cram on. Then the train rumbled out of the station, jerking and rocking as it picked up speed.

Pulling the scarf closer around her face, Genevieve did her best to block out the motion, the racketing of the wheels over the rails, the buzz of many disparate conversations and all the unpleasant smells that resulted from too many people stuffed into too small a space. German soldiers patrolled the train, appearing without warning at the end of the car to pick their way down its length while closely eyeing the occupants before moving on to the next. After a single unwary glance, she kept her gaze averted from the unappetizing sight of a Wehrmacht officer and his French ladylove kissing and pawing each other in the seat in front of her and thus earning shocked mutters of “Shame” and “No decency” from the women beside her.

Instead she looked out at the passing countryside. At first she concentrated on the sights of the city, and then the just-greening fields and small villages and farms. Soon enough, though, she was staring blindly through the glass as everything outside herself faded away.

Her mother, her father, her sister: their faces were all she could see. Their voices were all she could hear.

She had been the little one, the quick-tempered one. The rebel of the family, while her sister had been the perfect child.

“Pretty is as pretty does.” She could hear her elegant, aristocratic mother scolding her for some transgression, using the rebuke that had become an oft-repeated refrain from the time she had entered her teens. She could see the reproving look in the aquamarine eyes that in shape and color were so like her own, the despairing shake of Baroness Lillian de Rocheford’s well-coiffed head.

“You can’t do those things, bébé.” Emmy—Emmanuelle, her sister, four years older and fair-haired like their father but with those same aquamarine eyes, the unspoken beauty of the family—chimed in, always on their mother’s side, scandalized by yet another breach of propriety on the part of her junior.

Paul, her handsome, easygoing father, defended her: “It is good that she is high-spirited. What, would you have her be boring?”

“I would rather her be boring than a scandal,” her mother answered grimly, and her father laughed, and Emmy looked serious, and she—she would toss her head and do just as she pleased and think that her mother was stuffy and her sister a bore and nothing bad could ever happen to her. Until something bad did.

“Cherbourg!”

The conductor’s bawling announcement of the train’s arrival brought Genevieve back to the present with a thud. Her breathing came too fast and her pulse raced and she felt—undone.

Leave the past in the past, she warned herself, repeating the words Max had said to her and growing impatient at herself for remembering them so well, then felt a chilly frisson of foreboding as she realized how impossible that now was. Cherbourg was the past, and she was here.

Disembarking, hurrying toward the bus that would take her the rest of the way to her destination, Genevieve was glad of the sunlight and the gentle caress of the wind blowing in off the sea. It was warmer here than in Paris, as it tended to be except in the dead of summer, when it was the reverse. Inhaling deeply of the briny-scented air, she tasted salt on her tongue and felt her stomach clench at the familiarity of it.

I’m almost home.

The smell and taste of the sea formed the backdrop of her childhood. It was ingrained in her memory just like the endless beaches and the big houses lining the boulevard by the bay and the tall hedgerows that served as living fences between even the most insignificant properties. The fifteenth-century walls, the bridge arching over the Divette, the narrow streets and small shops, the green parks, the stone houses, all were unchanged.

What had changed was that the town was now thick with Germans, civilians as well as soldiers bearing insignia of all ranks and service branches. Military trucks rattled through the streets. The docks where local fishermen had once cast their nets had been turned into a fortress of huge concrete walls dotted by manned lookout towers and a host of antiaircraft guns. A stopping point for large transatlantic ocean liners, including the doomed Titanic, Cherbourg during the Great War had been a major arrival and departure point for American and British troops. Now as the only deepwater port in the region, and with England only 112 kilometers away directly across La Manche, the English Channel, the town was of vital strategic importance to this second wave of murderous Germans. It was, therefore, heavily defended. Every weaponized aquatic vessel from torpedo boats to destroyers, including one the approximate size of a stadium, bobbed at anchor in the harbor.

As the bus trundled through each successive neighborhood, Genevieve saw more and more damage, houses burned to their foundations, whole blocks reduced to rubble, craters in the streets. Anger filled her, and she was silently cursing the Germans when she heard a pair of fellow passengers damning the Brits and the Americans for the destruction, blaming them for blitzing the town with almost nightly air raids.

“The bombs will stop soon enough,” one of them, a graybeard in a tattered overcoat, consoled the other. “They will attack once too often with their waves of aeroplanes, and Göring and his Luftwaffe will be waiting. Rommel is here, too, to beat them back if they try to land along the coast. The Tommies and their friends stand no chance of winning against those two. They will be defeated in the air and on the land. The war will be over before you know it.”

“The whole world is turning upside down,” his stooped and bespectacled companion said, and sighed. “What can you do? We must all adapt as best we can.”

This sense of fatalism, the certainty that the military juggernaut that was Germany could not be defeated, was widespread among her fellow citizens. The many who took that view looked with horror and rage on those French who were in the Resistance, who actively worked to undermine the Reich. The fear was that the rash actions of a few would bring hideous reprisals down upon them all.

The bus was well out in the countryside now, one of the few nonmilitary vehicles on the road that skirted the vast salt marsh where she had passed many a pleasant hour exploring during her childhood. Cool and dark, mysterious and dangerous, the swamp was avoided as a matter of course by most, although it nevertheless managed to claim fresh victims every year. Taught to respect it by her mother, Genevieve had also been taught its secrets. She had missed it, she realized as she caught fleeting glimpses of brackish water glinting among tall reeds, missed the sense of freedom she had found there, missed its wildness and its magic.

Through the windows she began to spot familiar landmarks. The hollow tree where bees often swarmed in the summer, the bog that had trapped the Paquets’ horse, the Cheviots’ now tumbledown barn—they brought the past alive again for her in a vivid rush of nostalgia. Then the one in particular she had been watching for came into view, and she jumped up and pulled the rope to request a stop.

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