April in Paris (21 page)

conspicuous in the country. The Germans were looking for me; the French wouldn’t trust me. I didn’t know where to find Chantal. Paris, then, I decided. I rejected any notion of crossing front lines and heading for home. From now on, I was a wanted man, a deserter who could be shot without trial. The Allied invasion crossed my mind. I smiled. To hope that the war would change in a way useful to
me
seemed like the most extravagant of fantasies.

I fell asleep, awoke freezing, got up stiff-limbed, and warmed myself by walking in circles around the inner courtyard. I was hungry and thirsty. You have to think in simple terms, I told myself; think of the obvious. In the cold night, which wouldn’t give way to morning, I felt my wounds most acutely. The wire in my jaw, my eye, which was leaking pus from one side, my bruises and lumps and cuts. I saw myself as a wreck. In rue des Saussaies, I’d taken my condition for granted. Now, however, in
freedom
, I was a pretty damaged specimen. In this state, I wouldn’t be able to withstand much in the way of privation. As I was completing a circle, it came to me: Hirschbiegel. I had no idea what had happened to him after that night in Turachevsky’s. He belonged to the Wehrmacht; his colonel was an influential man. No one would seriously suspect Hirschbiegel of having had anything to do with the attack. Was he still in Paris? Had his unit received its marching orders already? The warmer I got, the heavier my head felt. I crouched under the stairs and fell asleep again.

Quite early in the morning, shivering from head to toe, I set out for my old hotel. Officers and enlisted men were walking in and out of it continually. Since the Allied invasion was only a matter of time, two men with machine pistols patrolled in front of the entrance. A hundred meters farther on, I hid behind the trunk of an oak tree, hoping I’d be able to recognize Hirschbiegel despite the distance.

The clock in the church tower struck nine. Although he always went to work at 7:30, he still hadn’t emerged. At ten o’clock, I turned away and headed for the river. Did it make any sense to wait in front of the building where Hirschbiegel’s unit had its offices? Deep down, I knew the truth. If he wasn’t staying in the hotel anymore, that meant he had left Paris. My friend was dis-charging his military obligation somewhere along the interminable Atlantic coast.

200 . M I C H A E L WA L L N E R

At noon, I reached Les Halles and got hold of some discarded vegetables. When a tumult erupted in the line of people waiting in front of a bakery, I seized the moment and stole a loaf of bread someone had dropped. That evening, I staked out the hotel a second time and tried again. But soon I realized my waiting was in vain.

As long as possible, I put out of my mind the idea of spend-ing another night under the staircase. My dread of the cold was greater than my fear of being apprehended. As I wandered aim-lessly through the second arrondissement and then the third, I noticed that I had inadvertently approached rue Faillard. I was seized by an insane hope that Hirschbiegel might have hidden the key somewhere. It was even possible that he’d figured I would show up at the flat one day. My longing to spend the night on that good mattress, in those comfortable rooms, was so irresistible that I resolved to risk the danger.

Moving cautiously, I turned into the narrow, empty street and stopped in front of the big door. I rang the bell and heard the familiar buzzing. My heart was racing as I stepped into the building and glided past the concierge’s booth. By the time I reached the fourth floor, my knees were weak. Hunger and exhaustion. I sat down on the stairs and contemplated the door of the flat from the landing and considered where Hirschbiegel might have hidden a key. I felt along the door frame, stuck my fingers into recesses, looked under the mat. I examined the window and peered under the edges of the stair treads. I didn’t want to admit the truth, so I went over everything twice. I crawled around, felt around, went down a floor and climbed back up, step by step, on A P R I L I N PA R I S . 201

my knees, left nothing out, and found nothing. In despair, I leaned all my weight on the door, but it didn’t budge a millimeter. Now I saw how unfounded my fantasy was. Only a dreamer in the occupied city, where everybody sought to protect whatever he had, could have supposed that Hirschbiegel would leave a handy key stashed somewhere. But some good came of my efforts. I climbed the stairs to the attic door, curled up on the half landing, and spent at least that night with a roof over my head.

Strangely enough, in the following days I had no fear of being recognized. The city was a prison in which inmates and guards tried to keep out of one another’s way. Gradually, the prison began to seethe. Even though the season wasn’t right, the Parisians took to wearing the three colors of the French flag. Red scarf, blue gloves, white shirt. Red coat, blue cap, white package under an arm. Despite the tightened security of those days, the painted
V

for Victory sign appeared on the walls of more and more buildings. The Wehrmacht, charged with obliterating the signs, could no longer keep up with them.

On my treks through the gray city, I observed dozens of prisoners. Few of them were Jews. Denunciations had increased; many people wanted to move quickly, before German rule came to an end, to rid themselves of a disagreeable neighbor or the pro-prietor of a competing shop. In spite of the frigid winter, Paris was edgier, more expectant, more aggressive than in the previous months. There were hours in which I saw myself not as an out-cast, anathema to both sides, but as a normal figure amid the hustle and bustle. I came upon individuals in whom I recognized a fate like my own: exiles who had held on for three years in Paris 202 . M I C H A E L WA L L N E R

and were now hoping for
liberation.
Collaborators who felt their skin sloughing off and didn’t know what new existence they should slip into. Most people were looking for something to eat.

It seemed impossible to get hold of any hot food. Once I begged a bowl of soup from the Sisters of Mercy. Another time, the driver of a milk truck gave me some warm grog. Afterward, I stood foggy-brained on the Pont Royal and thought about the days when fishermen sat on the warm stone of this bridge.

Everybody dreamed about seeing the German uniforms disappear once and for all. They were, however, more present than ever. In every neighborhood, at all the intersections, the occupiers acted with inflexible harshness. But the uprising was now a
thought
; it existed before the real preconditions for it had been established. I savored being a nameless inhabitant of the city in those days. I was both observer and prisoner, united in one person.

Anarrow track led through the snow. Rue de Gaspard lay there, gray and abandoned, not a living soul in sight.

There must have been a fire in the junk dealer’s shop. Black marks like tongues on the singed walls reached as high as the openings for the windows. A cold wind blowing. Old Joffo’s bookshop was boarded up. I bent down and grabbed the corner of the lowest board. They’d done a thorough job, and they’d used long nails.

I retraced my steps. In front of the junk shop, I found a charred pole I could use as a lever. The first nail yielded with a screech; the board gave way a little. I pushed and pulled it, heedless of whether anyone was watching me. I ripped away two more planks and found the door handle. The glass had been shattered; I stuck my hand in and opened the door from inside. With a last look at the street, I crawled under the remaining boards and into the shop.

204 . M I C H A E L WA L L N E R

“Chantal!” I shouted as soon as I got past the door.

Everything had changed since the last time, when I’d found Joffo in the cellar. I looked around amid overturned bookshelves, smashed racks, and scattered books. Hundreds, thousands of volumes lay in heaps.

“Chantal, it’s me!”

I was trembling with anticipation, but at the same time I was terrified at the thought of facing Chantal. I’d become pretty ragged since the last time we’d met; my trousers were dirty from sleeping on the ground, and many a loose thread hung from my jacket. My beard was unshaven and itchy. Earlier, when I passed in front of the Lubinsky, the waiter had failed to recognize me.

I worked my way deeper into the shop, reached the counter, and slipped around it. Pensively, I picked up Joffo’s ledger. My eyes scanned the little figures—I caught myself adding them up.

I put the book aside and moved to the stove, where the poker was. My fingers sought out its flattened tip; weeks ago, I’d used this tool to raise the trapdoor. I pried it open again, just as I’d done before, lighted a match, and climbed down into the cellar.

“Chantal!” I repeated her name several times. “Don’t hide, Chantal! Chantal, it’s me!”

Everything in the cellar was as I remembered it: dirty, empty, and forsaken. I lit up every corner. There was a bucket of old potatoes on the floor, their shoots intertwined with one another.

The match burned my fingers. I dropped it and then just stood there, weary with disappointment.

The idea had come to me earlier, under the arches of the Pont Royal: Chantal hadn’t left Paris! She was hiding—just like me! It had seemed like the only possible explanation. I went back up to A P R I L I N PA R I S . 205

the shop, sat down on a mound of books, and took my head in my hands.

“On the day when the Germans marched into Paris, Papa accompanied old Bertrand to the Champs-Elysées.”

Chantal was wearing the same heavy jacket she’d had on the last time I saw her in Turachevsky’s. Mannishly, she put one foot on the books and braced her elbows against her knee. “The two old fellows stood on the side of the street, not saying a word,” she continued. “To keep from crying, Papa said, he sang the ‘Marseil-laise’ under his breath. The tank treads were making so much noise, no one heard him.”

“And then?”

“Bertrand started singing the ‘Internationale.’ Imagine it—

two old men, singing, and the German panzers rolling by.”

She pushed her hair off her forehead. My side itched. Even though it seemed ungentlemanly to do so in Chantal’s presence, I started scratching myself. I’d picked up a flea somewhere. He was making himself comfortable in the warmth of my armpits.

“A year later, in the rue de Seine, I found a leaflet and brought it home,” she said. “Papa read it with a degree of emotion he or-dinarily reserved for the works of Rabelais.”

Now that I’d started, I couldn’t stop scratching. I hunched my shoulders and scraped and rubbed and did a jerky dance. This didn’t bother Chantal.

“Soon after that, Gustave came back from the front. He brought a Gascon with him. A man with the necessary contacts.

That same week, we carried the individual parts of a printing press, piece by piece, into the cellar under the barbershop.”

The itching was getting even worse. I jumped up, scratching 206 . M I C H A E L WA L L N E R

harder and harder. Something stuck to the sole of my shoe—a bit of colored paper. I raised my leg, scratching it the whole time, and glanced at the paper; it was a drawing. I pulled it off my shoe.

Simple lines, the spaces between them filled in with colored pencils. I recognized at once what the picture represented: “The Fox and the Grapes.”

“Did you draw this, Chantal?” I asked. Chantal went into the shop. I looked at the drawing, which showed the fox with his forepaws on a tree trunk. The branch with the cluster of grapes was out of his reach.

“Have you ever wondered,” I cried out, “why the artist hangs the grapes on a tree, when they actually grow on vines?” I imagined Chantal as a child, sitting here with her pencils and copying the illustrations in the book. “All roads are in the
Fables,
” I murmured. Then I raised my head and listened.

“What did you mean by that—‘All roads are in the
Fables
’?” I followed Chantal into the shop. “Chantal?”

I carefully folded the paper and put it in my pocket. Then I started stalking around like a bookworm gone mad, picking up something here, smoothing out a creased page there. I tried to re-construct the way the books had once been arranged. I found a shelf with
R
and
S
and stepped across to the opposite wall, where Baudelaire had been cast down, along with the other authors whose names started with
B.
I raised overturned bookcases and dug into the heaps of books, throwing aside the ones whose authors’ names didn’t begin with
F.
Stopping often so I could listen, I finally found Flaubert. Then I started digging harder, until all at once I was looking at the familiar cover illustration: sea green A P R I L I N PA R I S . 207

water, and in the depths the shadowy fish-monster. I carefully picked up the volume of La Fontaine’s
Fables.
“Yes,” I said, nodding in the fading indoor light. “Yes indeed!” I sat on a prostrate bookcase and started turning pages.

“The Dove and the Ant.”

“The Astrologer Who Fell into a Well.”

“The Hare and the Frogs.”

I read excitedly, with one finger on the pictures. When I came to the fable of “The Cock and the Fox,” I stopped. In the margin, there was a copy of a detail from the illustration. A childish hand had drawn Doré’s fox in pencil.

“You have talent, Chantal,” I said, smiling and concentrating even harder on the following pages. Soon I started discovering not only pictures in the margins but also annotations. Next to the picture of a dire wolf, I deciphered the words “Uncle Bébert.”

And “When we were in Trouville” was scribbled beside a seascape.

I reached the fable called “Fortune and the Young Boy.” Fortuna, a strapping nude, stands on the wheel of fortune with one hand on a little boy’s breast. He’s sitting on the edge of a well; thick vegetation surrounds them both. I recognized the picture—

it had been the first female nude of my childhood. On the lower margin of the page, some penciled words: “Grandpa’s woods, forest of Balleroy.”

I sat motionless, staring at the phrase, and recollected Chantal’s words. The first time we met, she called the fish on the cover a “catfish.”