A Troubled Peace (8 page)

“
E
lle n'a aucune nouvelle de ta soeur?”

“Non.”

Two middle-aged women turned a corner and passed Henry. One held a sprig of purple lilac and looked as if she had just received a death notice. Henry could translate that she was worried about her sister. She pulled out a handkerchief, dropping the lilac.

The other picked up the blossom and held it as her friend blew her nose, loudly. She asked about a Madame Rousseau and a photo.

“Oui, oui, j' la lui ai montrée.”
The woman began to sob, saying she had shown her sister's photo to Madame. But Madame knew nothing about her.

Something about the name
Rousseau
made Henry stop, stoop to tie his shoes, and eavesdrop. Henry had carried a novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the train station to sig
nal Madame Gaulloise that he was “her package.” Clearly Gaulloise was a code name for her, since it was a brand of French cigarettes. Could Madame Gaulloise and this Madame Rousseau the women were discussing be one and the same? It was a ridiculous long shot, he knew. But he'd been grasping at straws since coming to France.

After a few moments the distraught woman was collected enough to explain more of what Madame Rousseau had said to her. Henry could make out
Ravensbruck, 45,000 women prisoners, slave labor.
And that Madame had given her the lilac as a symbol of hope.

The two women fell silent. Finally, the friend put her arm around the distraught one's shoulders.
“Alors, on n'a plus qu'attendre et prier.”
Together, they went to wait and to pray.

Ravensbruck. Henry hurried to the corner and peered down the street the women had traveled. It quickly opened into countryside. In the distance were the glistening waters of a river. Beside it was a gracious manor house, plumes of purple cresting over its garden walls.

Henry caught his breath. He recognized it. It was Madame Gaulloise's house. And if he understood the women right, she was there—alive!

 

Henry bolted down the street and banged on Madame Gaulloise's door. Giddy with relief, he wondered if the butler would recognize him.

No one answered.

He banged some more. His knocking boomed in a hollow echo.

Still nothing. No footsteps, no yapping from Madame's little poodle.

Henry backed down the stairs, realizing that the marble horse heads that once had flanked their bottom rung were gone, knocked off their pedestals. He tried to catch the bottom ledge of a first floor window, to pull himself up to look inside, but they were just out of his reach. He did note, though, that the lavish curtains he remembered being in the parlor, framing the windows, were missing.

Uneasy, Henry walked the perimeter of the house and the wall to the river side of the estate. He heard the creaking of a gate drifting
open, shut, open, shut
in the gentle breeze off the water. He followed the sound.

Puffs of wind brushed the ivy around, revealing a tall door leading into the garden. Henry put his hand on the sun-warmed wood, held his breath, and pushed.

The first thing that hit him was the wonderful fragrance of lilac, of spring. The garden was overgrown, blooming wildly with wisteria and tulips. In the far corner, basking in the sun beside a forest of the purple lilac, was a small woman. She faced away from Henry and was wrapped in blankets, her head and neck covered in scarves as colorful
as the garden surrounding her.

Just like Madame to take in an invalid, thought Henry. The house was probably full of refugees she was helping, just as in the year before. She must be upstairs tending to them. That's why she hadn't answered the door. Barely able to contain his excitement, he called out,
“Pardonnez-moi, est Madame Gaulloise ici?”

The woman did not respond. Henry approached, repeating his question about Madame's whereabouts as he came around to face her.

Henry halted, aghast. The woman was so bundled in blankets, he couldn't tell how thin she was, but her face was skeletal, all eyes it seemed—huge, dark, mournful eyes.

“Eh, barre-toi!”
A tall young man appeared from inside the house and tried to shoo off Henry.
“Elle a déjà répondu à assez de questions comme ça aujourd'hui.”

The youth was bone thin but vital, about Henry's age and size. He was shouting that there had been enough questions for one day. He had to be Madame's son.

Too excited to be polite, Henry blurted out: “I am looking for your mother. She saved my life.”

“Ahhhh.” A small voice, as whispery as the garden's scents, came from the blanketed woman. “
Chéri
. Now I recognize you.”

The invalid, the living scarecrow, was Madame Gaulloise.

 

Henry followed the son through Madame's house, just as he had once followed her butler. Madame had insisted that Henry spend the night. The son, suspicious, hostile, had led him to a guest room with no comment. Henry excused the silence. His mother was in the shape she was because of him and other Allied fliers.

With each step through her home, Henry's anger and disgust grew. The Nazis had taken most of her furniture and books, urinated in zigzags to stain the rose-silk wallpaper, and cut out the eyes of the portrait paintings. They had left the baby-grand piano, but had carved “Jew-lover” along its top and snapped some of its strings. Henry remembered the night Madame Gaulloise had played that piano for him, pieces by Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy, she'd said. He'd developed a terrible schoolboy crush on her, completely beguiled by her intellect, her matter-of-fact courage, her beauty.

Back downstairs, Henry tried to picture her as she had been a year ago, as her son carried her inside, laid her gently on the one remaining sofa, and propped her up on pillows. A little cloud of down feathers puffed out of gashes left by the Nazis.

“So,
chéri
, you made it home,” she said, settling in, a twinge of that vivacious smile lighting her emaciated face. “Your
maman
rejoiced, yes?”

Henry nodded. He was fighting to find his normal voice, he was so appalled by her condition. Madame had taken his hand when he came into the room. Hers was so frail, the light shone through her skin.

Henry told her of his homecoming, of Lilly, of Patsy, of Clayton throwing two baskets of eggs into the air because he was so glad and surprised to see Henry alive. He joked that he had been so thin when he got back that Speed had been the only one to recognize him at first.

Madame actually laughed, a tiny throaty burble. “So, you were much changed, as am I,
chéri
.”

Her son looked away sharply and swallowed hard. Henry took a deep breath to steady his own emotion. “But you are still beautiful, Madame.
Très belle
.”

Those dark, sad eyes brightened. “A compliment? You have become bolder, young man. But I fear your French pronunciation is still…hmmmm…well, now you have time to work on it.” She self-consciously straightened the scarf around her throat and touched the one on her head, to make sure it was in place. Both were festooned with delicate orchid patterns, a swirl of rich mauves and lavenders.

Henry could see that all that was left of her dark, glossy hair were little tufts. Sores scarred her temples. He had to force himself to smile.

Madame studied Henry a little longer.

“Aha!” She glanced over at her son and said, “You see, darling, I am remembering more and more. This young man wanted to take a scarf like my Hermès home to his
maman
. He loves her dearly, just as you do me. Having such a son live, such a son come home, makes all of this right.
S'il te plaît, ne pleure pas
. Do not mourn.”

Henry could see the son's jaw clench as he ground his teeth.

Madame turned back to Henry. “You were number thirty-seven.”

Thirty-seven! Henry knew well that each person she helped raised her risk of exposure. “How many did you save, Madame?”

“Forty-six,” Madame answered proudly. “I am afraid the last flier did me in.”

The son muttered some French oaths and moved to the window.

“It was my own fault, darling.” She tried to quiet him. To Henry she explained: “The Nazis were becoming more watchful, more clever. They purposefully stepped on the toes of train passengers to see what they might exclaim. A Brit muttered “bloody hell” and they got him. What linked him to me was a foolishness on my part.”

Henry was ahead of her. The Rousseau book. He remembered it was set in Montreux, where Madame had picked him up, her stop on his ratline to freedom. If her
real last name was indeed Rousseau and the Nazi who got the guy had been one of the officers Madame had charmed for petrol or at the gaming tables, the link would be easy to make.

She nodded and threw her hands up. “And the greatest foolishness was my name
is
Heloise, just like the title.” She shrugged. “Perhaps I was tempting fate, trying to show just how stupid the Nazis were by waving my real identity in such a way right before them. Hubris,
non
? Pride. Since the Greeks, since
Oedipus
, it has been the tragic flaw that brings down our heroes and ends the play.” She smiled, then faded, worn out by talking.

Henry and her son watched her for a few minutes, to see if she might drift off to sleep. But she didn't. Madame remained awake, watchful but withdrawn, beyond their reach, like a small animal that backed itself into a hole to watch a predator pace right outside. Henry remembered that feeling, trying to stay on alert but shut down at the same time, because any flicker of emotion would catch their attention, spur the Gestapo on, ignite their cruelty.

Henry felt sick with sadness. Seeing that wary look, how ingrained it was in Madame, told him more than anything what she had endured. He was completely lost as to what to say. This woman had been strong, fierce, like Joan of Arc, a crusader. And now…Henry glanced at the son and cringed at the anger on his face. He knew how he'd
feel if he ever saw Lilly so reduced.

A few awkward minutes dragged past. Henry couldn't stand not doing anything to try to help. He searched his mind for some sort of solution. But what could possibly address such damage? Then Henry remembered something simple—how wildflowers, hatched robin's eggs, and other beautiful things of nature had always cheered Lilly when Clayton was being difficult.

Triumphantly, he pulled from his pocket the cherries he had purchased from the boy. “I have brought these for you, Madame. A boy was selling them in the market.”

Madame gasped.
“Des cerises!”
She struggled to sit up and reached for one. Thrilled to see her so revived, Henry held them toward her.

“Stop!” The son lunged and grabbed his mother's wrist.

Crying out in pain, she collapsed and nursed her arm. She was so delicate, even that gentle of a knock left her bruised.

Her son knelt beside her, slamming his hand against the floor in self-loathing.
“Pardonne-moi, maman.”

“Please,” she whispered, her eyes welling up with tears.
“S'il te plaît, est-ce que je pourrais en prendre une? Une seule?
Just one?”

“Non, maman.”

Crushed by her son refusing, she pleaded to Henry, “Please, young man. Please, may I have one? I have not
tasted any fruit since they arrested me. Please?” She seemed almost frantic.

Henry was bewildered, furious. Why the heck couldn't she have some of the cherries? She was clearly starved and desperate to have one. “Of course, Madame, they are for you,” Henry extended his cupped hand again.

“Idiot!”
The son shoved Henry back so hard and suddenly the cherries scattered across the floor. “They could poison her. Americans have killed hundreds of deportees that they liberated from the camps by giving them candy bars and C-rations. The prisoners' stomachs, so shrunken, were not ready. After all they survived, food killed them!

“She can have nothing but gruel in teaspoonfuls right now.” He choked on the words. “Nothing more.” He caught his mother's butterfly-delicate hand and kissed it tenderly.
“Je suis vraiment désolé, maman.
Remember what the doctor said. You must trust me. You must.”

Madame looked at him with such disappointment, such weary acceptance of being denied food. She seemed to wither in front of them. But she managed to touch her son's face lovingly and whisper that she understood.
“Je comprends, mon petit.”

Then came the cough.

It was a tiny gag at first. Then rattling heaves that shook her body. And finally violent retching that left splatters of blood on the handkerchief her son hurriedly held to her
lips. She reeled in breath with a scraping rasp, the same kind of agonizing clawing for air Henry had had trying to survive the bathtub torture by the Gestapo.

For a moment she calmed. Then the cough began again.

“Get out!” The son shouted at Henry. He held his mother, rocking her gently. “Breathe,
maman. Respire pour moi
.”

Henry backed his way out and hurried for the garden, for light, for air. A cough like that could only mean one thing—tuberculosis, a killer disease that consumed the lungs until someone could no longer breathe. Madame was dying.

T
hat evening, the son found Henry in the garden. Henry was doing the only thing he could think to do for Madame. He was weeding her flower bed.

He'd made quick work of it—a childhood of hoeing and picking was worth something at least. He'd uncovered a wide swath of little white blossoms, dangling from their stalks like tiny bells. No longer choked by the coarse grasses that Henry had yanked and piled up, their fragrance burst into the air. It reminded him of the perfume Madame wore when he had first met her. He'd picked one to sniff more carefully and was sitting cross-legged in the gravel walkway when Madame's son approached.

“What are you doing?”

Henry jumped up, embarrassed to be found smelling flowers. “Just thought I'd tidy up your garden a bit.”

The son looked distracted, or perhaps perplexed. Clearly he'd never dirtied his hand with thinning out weeds.

Henry tried to strike up a conversation. “I was wondering,” he said, holding up the delicate spray of white blossom, “what these are called. I've never seen them before.”

At first the son seemed startled by the question. “Lilies of the valley,” he replied. He looked out toward the river. “Next week, on May First, there is an old tradition in Paris. People leave the city to pick lilies of the valley in the forests. We give them as good luck. I wonder if anyone will remember to do it. Who can remember flowers now?” He paused, rubbed his forehead, and then murmured, “Mother and I did it every year when I was small.”

Lilies of the valley. Henry heard his own mother's voice waft to him, singing,

Lilly believed in faeries and the magic of flowers she'd never seen. Such delight in what the world did offer had kept her strong, hopeful even during the Depression and in a difficult marriage. Henry had realized last year, when
he finally made it home, how Clayton's toughness had groomed Henry to be resilient, to survive the war. Now he recognized how Lilly's influence had kept his spirit alive as well.

Both young men stood awkwardly, deep in thought.

Finally, Madame's son seemed to shake himself. “My mother reminds me to show my manners.” He smiled for the first time. “And to apologize for being rude. She is correct. After five years in a German POW camp, I forget the niceties of life. My name is François Rousseau.” He extended his hand and bowed slightly.

Henry took it. “Henry Forester.” Hoping to establish some kind of friendship, he said, “Moms are like that. I survived missions over Germany and being hunted by the Nazis and my ma still reminds me to wipe my boots on the mat when I come in.”

François laughed. “My mother wishes to speak with you. She is in the parlor. I will prepare dinner.” He smiled again, sheepishly. Henry was beginning to see touches of Madame's face in his. “It will not be good, I am afraid. We have very little and I am only learning now to cook. Our cook was arrested with our butler.”

“Will they return soon?”

François's smile vanished. “They were shot for helping my mother protect airmen. They made Mother watch. That seems to be the only thing that she truly regrets
about all this—their execution. Somehow she believes her time in prison, her ruined health, is all worth it to save boys like you.”

François took a step toward Henry and grabbed the collar of his jacket. The gesture was not threatening, but urgent. “Be worth her sacrifice.”

He released Henry's coat and walked into the house. The words dealt Henry a blow as hard as the
maquisard
's to his ribs. Madame had saved forty-six lives. What could he possibly accomplish that would be an adequate counterweight to the loss of this brave woman? Him, with his nightmares and high-strung nerves.

Slowly, purposefully, Henry filled himself up again with a long, deep breath. He straightened his back, steeling himself by the bite at his bruised rib. “No kidding, Forester. No more sniveling. Get it together. From now on. You owe Madame that at least.”

 

Inside, Madame was sitting at the piano. A paisley shawl covered her shoulders, but now it was painfully clear just how thin she was. A good wind would blow her away, thought Henry. Her arms and fingers were all bones. And yet, as before, those long fingers were pulling out beautiful music from the piano. A serene, lilting melody floated above sustained chords, like shifts in dappled sunlight atop a pool of water. Once again, Henry felt himself inching
toward her to listen.

The pinkie of her left hand touched a key that thumped dead, her thumb a key that jangled wire. Madame sighed and stopped. “Such cretins.” She shifted her hands to play the piece up an octave, where the Nazis had not cut the piano's strings. “
Voilà
. Here they cannot touch me.”

Madame played on, peaceful content smoothing her face. The music closed on a whisper, a slow resolution of dissonance to a chord like the ones that ended hymns at Henry's church. She froze as the held harmony throbbed and dissolved into the air.

Only then did Madame look up at Henry.
“C'est très beau, n'est-ce pas?”

Henry nodded. “What was that, Madame?”

“Mendelssohn's ‘Consolation' from
Songs Without Words
. It is hard to understand how a nation that spawned him, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, can listen to Hitler. How a people who make such music can exterminate an entire race of people. Angels and devils in the same soul.”

Gently, she reached to touch Henry's hand. “Now,
mon ami
, why are you here? I sent you home. As glad as I am to see you, you disappoint me.”

Henry quavered. Her concern was such an invitation to spill his soul. But he stopped himself. He could not burden her, in this depleted state, with his nightmares, the wild actions that had driven him back to France. He'd
reclaimed that much self-control and recognition at least. So he told her about Pierre, about Pierre's mother. “Her brother said they would send her to Ravensbruck. Do you think she survived?”

Madame's face clouded. “Do you know her name?”

Henry only knew the boy's first name. Wait—the priest had said Pierre Dubois. Did she know a Dubois in her late twenties, very pretty, dark eyes, petite in size? What an idiot he'd been not to learn her first name.

Madame smiled sadly and shook her head. That description fit hundreds. “If she is young, hopefully she was strong. She would have to be strong. Every several weeks we all had to lift our skirts to our hips and run in front of the SS guards and doctors. Women who were too weak to run, or were slow, or had swollen feet or legs, were pulled aside to be transported to Mittweida. The guards said there was a place for them to recover. In truth they were gassed to death in the transport trucks.”

Henry thought he would vomit. “I am so sorry, Madame. I feel like this is my fault.” Henry poured out the story of the Gestapo's interrogation, of the SS officer holding up a scarf and saying they held a woman they suspected had aided him, of his managing to kill the Nazi and escape.

Madame stopped him. “Then, you see,
chéri
. Your escaping the Gestapo did save me.” Her smile was incredibly generous, like a Madonna's in the paintings that had
once graced her house along with the jumbled up Picasso. Henry remembered her talking of her romance with the painter and how, on the day that he left, the Picasso was gone—sold to finance his escape. Henry owed this woman so much. And she was still trying to help him. “The worst part was Herr Barbie, in Lyon,” she continued. “He told me he was going to hang me with an American they had just picked up. Then he never mentioned it again—which was a small victory that buoyed me with hope. It clearly was you. Since you were clever enough to escape, they could not use you against me.
Merci, mon chevalier
. Once I arrived in Ravensbruck, it was not so bad.”

Henry felt a wave of redemption that somehow his actions may have helped her even a little. But he wasn't so sure that Ravensbruck was “not so bad.” “You lie to make me feel better, Madame.”

“Oh, only a little lie,
chéri
,” she teased. “You call them ‘white lies' do you not? Such an odd expression. Why white? White is pure. It should be gray, or pink perhaps, tinged only slightly with the red of deception. I have never understood the metaphors of English. It is a hard language to grasp. Oh, and
mon Dieu
, your Americanisms.
Pff
!” For a moment, Madame was once again the witty woman who fliers would follow anywhere, completely trusting in her clever courage and put-on drama.

Then she sobered. “But it was English that saved me in
the camp. My knowledge of German, French, and English. There were so many nationalities—Poles, Russians, German Jews, Dutch, gypsies, captured SOE agents—they used me as a translator. So I avoided the worst labor. Other women had to pull huge iron rollers to pave streets, dig ditches and canals to drain the marshes, clear forests. Each day, twelve hours of backbreaking work. They could not do that for long on what we were fed—a half pint of brown water they called coffee, one pint of beet soup, and a fist-sized hunk of bread. That was all for the day. We tried to survive on dandelions we could pick through the barbed wire, by drinking water we drained off their truck engines when the guards weren't looking. We salivated over the single sausage we were granted once a week. But for most it was not enough. Many dropped dead as they labored, and were left to rot.

“Better that death, perhaps, than the experiments. That was the worst thing I had to do, to explain their plans to infect women with bacteria, to sever their nerves, to break their bones to see how or if they would heal. To translate the lie that if the prisoners agreed to such tests or to be sterilized, they would be freed. I tried to warn them, I tried.” Madame gagged and held her hand to her mouth.

“Don't, Madame. Don't try to tell me any more.”

She was trembling. “No.” Her voice was hoarse. “You must hear. You must tell your countrymen. Already people do not want to acknowledge, cannot face what was
done. But they must if we are to prevent it from happening again. The horror of it will keep us vigilant.”

“You are a remarkable woman, Madame. I don't know how you survived.”

Madame closed her eyes and ran her fingers along the tops of the piano keys. “I remembered this,” she whispered. “I remembered my son's laughter. I recited poetry I knew by heart. I refused to weep. Those who cried at night were dead the next morning.

“I built a safe fortress with my memories, an inner peace that came from knowing that I had done what had to be done.” She opened her eyes and looked at Henry, a flicker of energy left in them. “Camus wrote that man's grandeur lies in his decision to rise above his condition. ‘There is no fate that cannot be surmounted with scorn.' Do you know his writing?”

Henry did not.

“Hmmm. You must. Look on my shelf. See if you find
Le Mythe de Sisyphe
. Perhaps the Nazis left that. Yes, is that it?” Henry was holding up a thin volume. “Take that with you.”

“It's in French, Madame.”

“
C'est vrai
. It will improve your French skills. You will have plenty of time to work through it on the train to Paris. It is merely a long essay. Camus is important for you to know. He was in the Resistance, editor of the underground paper
Combat
. The next to last line of this book is
most inspiring: ‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.'” She nodded to herself. “The struggle itself.'
Oui
.” Madame drifted off in thought.

“Wait,” Henry was focused on something else she'd said, not on the literature. “A train to Paris, Madame?”

“
Oui
. I suspect that is where you will find your Pierre—at the station where the liberated prisoners return. Thousands will come through in the next few weeks and months. I was released early, one of almost three hundred women the Nazis selected to be exchanged for German prisoners de Gaulle held in France. I was selected because my Swiss friends had continued to protest my arrest. We were thought to be the most presentable, the least damaged, to soften the reality of the camps. I suppose we were—only eleven of us died during the train trip.

“I do not think people awaiting us knew what was to come. They held lilacs and lipsticks and face powder to give us, thinking we'd merely be tired from a long journey and want to freshen up. They did not know that our hair had been shaved like sheep to make yarn for sweaters, that we were covered with lice and sores, that our teeth were rotted, that we were consumed with dysentery, TB. A man asked one of my friends, who could barely stand, where her luggage was. Imagine! She handed him all she had, a black sweater tied in a bundle to protect belongings she had counted over and over again. I can recite the contents
after hearing it so often—two safety pins, a ball of twine, a shard of soap, a button, one aspirin tablet, a pencil nub, a comb, a match. These were treasures in camp.

“We sang ‘The Marseillaise' as we stepped off that train. Such off-key joy we had. But the crowd could not join us, they wept so in shock at us.”

She quieted. Henry could barely hear her final instructions. “At the station, I saw children holding signs with their names written on them, hoping their mothers would step off the train and see them. Or that one of us would know something of their parents' fate.
Pauvres enfants.
Look there. At Gare de l'Est. Or at Hotel Lutetia, where the returnees go if no one awaits them at the station.”