April in Paris (23 page)

I was looking for a short, simple name. Something regal was hidden in it. The word began with an
F
or a
B.
I was sure it would come back to me. The village, the hamlet, where Chantal’s grandfather’s property was—the place whose name she’d scribbled in the margin of the
Fables.
Every day, I spent hours trying to recall that name. My eyes slid over the various towns. I didn’t want to admit to myself that I had, inexplicably, forgotten it.

Valie brought me soup—vegetable soup, mostly. Once, she dipped bits of white bread in milk and put it in my mouth piece by piece. I chewed it with my gums and the stumps of my remaining teeth. How good it tasted! From that day on, she brought me bread soup every day.

I often thought about how I could properly thank Valie for taking care of me. However, my suspicion that she might be working for Leibold had not vanished altogether. When my face A P R I L I N PA R I S . 219

had healed to the point where I could speak, I asked her, “Why are you doing this for me?”

Valie was sitting on the stool next to my bed. It was evening.

“I knew Wasserlof,” she said. Her hands lay motionless on her apron. “One day, he arrived with a lady and gentleman from Germany and showed them the apartment. Monsieur and Madame Hirschbiegel were elegant people. Monsieur gave me something for my trouble.”

She stood up and rummaged about the room. “After that, he often came to Paris alone, even after Wasserlof died. When the Germans marched in, I asked him, ‘What’s going to happen with the flat?’ He said, ‘I guess I’m not going to get around to paint-ing it.’ That made us both laugh.” Valie’s cheeks glowed. “One day, well into the war, Hirshbiegel’s son showed up to try out his key. He doesn’t look like his father. Then you and the young lady came. In the end, the Germans came.” Valie shrugged her shoulders. “That’s it.”

I didn’t understand her cheerfulness. She was talking about the enemy, after all. Hirschbiegel was a Wehrmacht lieutenant. I myself was the enemy who’d occupied the city and had his fun with a Parisian girl. I asked Valie about this. She only smiled and left the room without answering.

She was in her middle forties and rather pretty, in a ripe, pon-derous way. Even in her apron dress, there was something attractive about her. I’d often wanted to ask her where her husband was. Had he been killed in combat or taken prisoner? All I found out was that Valie had worked as a nurse before the war. She knew a few things about bones.

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

She wasn’t worried about my right leg. The break in my femur had been clean and was healing normally. In my left leg, however, both bones had been splintered, and my calf was a mess. Valie cleaned the open wounds and put the broken parts back together.

So far, there had been no infection. But whether the leg was growing back together in the correct position, she couldn’t say.

The wood and bandages I was wrapped with began to smell.

She changed the splints. I hardly felt anything. Except for a few bruises, my left arm was almost healed, so I could eat and leaf through the school atlas reasonably well. The sole hindrance was the bandage on my hand. I’d seen the wound under the dressing only once. Valie prepared me for the shock: my little finger had been torn off at the joint. It must have happened when I skidded off the roof. The skin was beginning to close over the bones. The place itched, but no worse than a wasp sting.

In the beginning of March, the fever came. At first, the spot under my knee looked like a boil. Then it began to fester. The skin swelled and burst and white fluid came out. Valie cleaned the wound daily with chamomile tea. I was in a lot of pain, and my whole body trembled. My blood raced; I thought I was going to lose my reason. Every time I opened my eyes, time had jumped ahead. I had no dreams, except one.

It began on a slope, where I was riding a bicycle downhill. I was surprised that the bike didn’t find the way down by itself. It was heavy. I looked at it more closely; it was made of pure gold.

Immediately, the bicycle turned into a perfectly round crown with large points. With an effort, I pushed it in front of me, farther and farther down the hill. Where to? I thought. What’s down A P R I L I N PA R I S . 221

there? Finally, I reached the lowest point, and there was the sea. I understood: The crown had to go into the water. I rolled it on in.

When I woke up, a word was with me. The word that belonged to the crown.
Balleroy.
I raised my head. “Balleroy,” I said to the Virgin Mary. She pointed upward.

When Valie came, I asked her if she knew a town named Balleroy, perhaps a place on the sea. She tried to wipe my forehead and cool my wrists. I warded her off and asked for the atlas.

Hesitantly, she opened it to the map of France. I wasn’t strong enough to concentrate very long. Everything got blurry. Soon, I fell asleep.

The next morning, Valie put a sharp knife in boiling water, took the knife out of the pot with a cloth, bent over my leg, and made an incision below my knee. I screamed. A great deal of liquid matter flowed out of the cut. Valie cleaned the wound with brandy. I lost consciousness.

After I came to, I asked her to join me in searching the map.

She moved the stool beside the bed. We began in the north, on the Belgian border, and traveled south and east along the coast.

At frequent intervals, I repeated the name Balleroy. We moved through the
départements
bordering the English Channel: Pas-de-Calais, Somme, Seine-Maritime, Eure. In Calvados, our fingers passed over the bathing resorts of Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer and Arromanches-les-Bains and investigated the area around Caen and Bayeux. And all at once, just as we were about to move on to Cherbourg, there was the name, right in front of us. Valie put her finger under it, and I said it. It was in small print, but clearly leg-ible: Balleroy.

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

It was in Basse-Normandie, much farther from Paris than I had assumed. The road that led there was a very thin line on the map. Somewhere along that road was Chantal’s grandfather’s farm. Maybe you won’t die after all, I said to myself. From that moment on, there was
conviction
in me.

The season of the year added to my confidence. As my infection gradually faded away, spring began. Even in the dark room, where sunlight never stayed long, you could feel nature waking up. I didn’t want to be sick anymore. Something had to change!

While I was still bedridden, listening to my splints knock together every time I shifted a leg, the trip to Normandy began to take shape in my mind. I could see it so clearly, it seemed as if rue Faillard led directly to the Balleroy road. Valie felt my restless-ness and forgave my frequent whining. I was a disagreeable, ill-humored patient who wanted out. I hated lying there, and I tried to get Valie to help me stand up. I asked for my clothes so often, she laid out shirt and trousers on the chair. From now on, they were ready, like a prospect of things to come.

Valie brought me scissors; my beard hung down to my chest.

I cut off clumps of curly hair. When Valie came in with a shaving brush and a razor and went calmly to work, I was certain she’d had a man and shaved him in such a way. Sitting amid beard clippings, I asked her about this.

“Yes, there was someone,” she said. “But he won’t ever come back.”

“Why not?”

“He’s far away.” The blade scraped over my cheek.

“Is he in the war somewhere?”

A P R I L I N PA R I S . 223

“He’s not well.”

“Wounded?”

She spoke hesitantly, but her voice was full of longing. “All I know is that Herr Hirschbiegel had to be admitted to a Munich hospital. His wife wrote and told me. That was before the war.”

Pensively, unhurriedly, Valie told me the story of her love affair with her German gentleman, which had lasted for many years. Since the letter from his wife, Valie had had no further news of him. She didn’t know whether monsieur was still alive.

I’d attributed many different motives to her, but not this one.

While the blade passed over my chin and my throat, Leibold’s phantom, which had always lurked behind Valie, disappeared at last.

She gave me back my real face. At my insistence, she brought a mirror. It was a ghastly sight. The SS corporals’
techniques
had fixed my jaw so that it hung down sideways. My lower teeth were exposed, the gaps between them clearly visible. They’d broken my nose; the smooth, narrow ridge was now a bumpy outcrop. I must have injured my neck when I fell—I had a scar from my ear to my collarbone. In many spots on my skull, the hair had been replaced by scabs; sparse tufts were growing back here and there.

I’d lost weight, my forehead was deeply lined, and purple bags hung down under my eyes. My twenty-third birthday wasn’t far off. But the person gazing at me from the mirror looked a lot older than that.

We took the splint off my right leg. The break had to be healed by now. I pushed my leg off the bed, laid my arm around Valie’s shoulders, set my foot on the floor, and stood up. I’d fig-224 . M I C H A E L WA L L N E R

ured on being very weak, but the truth was horrifying. My leg folded up like a lifeless piece of meat. I sensed the floor tile under the ball of my foot and felt my knee bend, but the leg was useless. I almost fell over. Valie held me up. She began hauling me around the room. The still-splinted leg served as a support; I dragged the other one along. We went in a circle. I was much too heavy for her, and soon she was breathing hard. After a few minutes, she dragged me back to the bed. I was despondent at the thought that I’d have to stay there several more weeks.

I asked Valie for other books, and she promised to get me some. That very evening, she brought me a German novel. It looked familiar. After some hemming and hawing, she admitted to having taken the book from Hirschbiegel’s flat. She had a key.

“You mean I could use it, too?” I asked enthusiastically.

“What’s the matter, you don’t like my place anymore,
boche
?”

It was the first time she’d used the word as a slur.

Many weeks had passed since I’d fallen from the roof into Valie’s keeping. I was a shattered man, and she nursed me; I was a wanted man, and she hid me. How could I repay her?

One evening, leafing through the atlas again, I noticed a page had come away from the binding. It was of the South Pacific and Oceania, detached from the rest of the world. For several minutes, I studied islands with such names as Onotoa or Nanumaga and ran my finger along the perimeter of the Fiji Basin. I followed the trace of the international date line, east of which it was always a day later than it was west of the line. Eventually, I picked up the loose page, smoothed it, and began to fold it. I had to destroy my creation twice, but on the third try, I succeeded in making a bird.

Both of its wings were blue. Its head was formed by the New Zealand coastline; the Gilbert Islands decorated its tail. I wrote

“For Valie” on its underside and waited for evening to come.

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

“A farewell gift?” she asked.

I was eating bean stew. She sat on the stool next to the bed and looked at the paper creature in her lap.

“How do you expect to make it?” My bird, like a swan unfit for flight, flew awkwardly from her hand.

“The way I’ve made it up to now,” I replied, hastening over the route in my mind.

Landscapes in the first flush of spring. Trees laden with blooms, the green haze over the fields. It was the end of March. I knew they’d assigned a quarter of a million men to the reinforcement of the Atlantic Wall. Ten bunkers per kilometer of shoreline. Dun-kerque, Le Havre, Cherbourg, Saint-Malo, Brest, and the Channel Islands had been declared “fortresses.” Panzer units, assault-gun units, and tank-destroyer units had moved in. Most of the soldiers were stationed in the very region I intended to cross.

On a crutch, alone, without money or papers. Searching for Chantal.

Valie thanked me and left the room. I lay awake all night long, imagining what would happen. I hoped Chantal could hear me.

The splint was bound tightly to my lower leg, over my trousers.

We embraced; I patted Valie’s warm back and felt the deep breath of the woman to whom I owed my life. It was unlikely that we’d ever see each other again. And yet Valie and I spoke about a time

“afterward” and made a plan to meet when everything was over.

With the crutch jammed into my armpit, I opened the door. We didn’t kiss. As I hobbled out onto rue Faillard, the wooden shafts made loud stumping sounds on the pavement.

A P R I L I N PA R I S . 227

I slipped out of the city by the morning light, in a group of about a hundred men on their way to join a labor deployment.

Once I was past the Bois, I hitched a ride in a vegetable truck.

The driver asked no questions. I was wearing a brown suit and shoes with hobnailed soles, because Valie had assumed that I’d have to travel most of the way on foot. She’d even managed to rustle up a coat for me.

Luck abandoned me after Poissy. A cloudburst made the road, which German tanks had turned into a gravelly wasteland, im-passable; the truck got stuck. The driver and I tried using boards to give the vehicle some traction. That was how I ruined my suit the first day I wore it. When the rain slackened, the vegetable man set out for the village to fetch a yoke of oxen. We bade each other farewell, and I continued my journey on foot. I hadn’t managed to travel very far from Paris.

The crutch sank into the muddy ground. I spent the first night by a stream, in the shelter of a willow grove. I drank water and ate some of the provisions that Valie had packed for me. Even though I was cold, it was an amazing experience to lie on the ground under a stormy sky after weeks cooped up in a back room. I closed my eyes euphorically and tried to recall what I knew about edible plants and mushrooms and berries, until it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to find anything of that sort in early April. All the same, I knew I’d reach Balleroy in the end, no matter how long it took. I imagined Chantal’s surprise, her happiness. I’d wait with her for the end of the war, work in the fields, and help with the harvests until we could begin our new lives.