Charlotte Gray (57 page)

"Where are they?"

"There's no one," said Anne-Marie, though her voice had begun to tremble. The two privates and the corporal came back down the ladder.

The corporal shrugged and spoke briefly in German. The sergeant smiled sceptically and shook his head, too, as he held up the book.

The private who had been overpowered by Julien at the Domaine stepped forward and grabbed Sylvie Cariteau by the hair, twisting her head. She screamed in pain as she turned her body round in the chair.

She pulled herself free from his grasp and stood up. She glanced for a second at Anne-Marie, as though for confirmation, and then, to the private's visible amazement, embraced him.

He pushed her back, but then seemed to think again, as though it was not so much what was offered as the way in which it was being made available that displeased him. He muttered to the corporal, who took Sylvie Cariteau by the arms while the private wrenched at the waistband of her skirt. As it tore, he began to shout at her and slap her in the face.

The sergeant watched indifferently as her clothes were ripped. Beneath the skirt there was a pair of silk drawers with a satin edge of daisies and forget-menots. The sergeant turned back to Anne-Marie and said something to the other private, who held her arms while the sergeant pulled away the clothes from her chest. His movements were slow and quite deliberate, unlike those of the corporal, who was slapping Sylvie Cariteau in a frenzy.

Both had loosened their belts and were fumbling with the fastenings of their trousers, pushing the women back against the kitchen table, while the other two men held them down.

Anne-Marie's mother was screaming.

"Stop it, stop it, stop it, you pigs. They're upstairs. I'll show you. Stop it." She battered the sergeant's shoulder with her small fists.

"The boys. I'll show you.

Come, come." She grabbed his arm and began to drag him across the room. The sergeant reluctantly buckled his belt and went with her. As he passed the corporal he shouted at him to stop what he was doing, as though unwilling to allow his junior what he himself had given up.

Sylvie and Anne-Marie rearranged their clothes beneath the sullen eyes of the German soldiers. From upstairs they heard a roar, then the sound of childish screams.

Andre and Jacob were pushed, slithering, down the ladder, followed more slowly by the sergeant and Anne-Marie's mother.

The sergeant smiled thinly at the two private soldiers and jerked his head towards the door. The men dragged the boys out into the dark afternoon. Anne-Marie's mother stood by the kitchen table, staring first at her daughter, then at the sergeant, her face scarlet with peasant defiance.

There was a moment's silence; then the sergeant gestured to the corporal, turned on his heel and left the house. Outside, an engine started up. Zozo moved his charge to a bare room above a chemist's at the other end of town. The shop was owned by his sister, a tall woman in a white coat with grey hair, who looked at Charlotte disapprovingly over the rims of her glasses when she made her way daily through the pharmacy at the back, past the shelves of pills and lotions. She never spoke, as Charlotte went through the door and up the small back staircase. The room had a bed with a blanket, a washing bowl and a jug. It overlooked an untended yard at the back, and beyond that a row of small houses. Every evening from Zozo's house Charlotte rang Sylvie Cariteau in Lavaurette, but there was never any news. The days went by. She borrowed books from Zozo to pass the time. In her cold room she felt the depth of her loneliness, but she would not give in to it. The value of all that she was and all she might become depended on whether she could see Levade and explain to him what Julien had done.

If she failed, then the broken ends of her own life would never be joined. On the eighth day, Sylvie Cariteau said she had a message, delivered by Cesar. Octave had sent him to say that all was well and that the name of the place was Drancy, near Paris. The word meant nothing to Charlotte.

She asked if there was news of the boys, and Sylvie broke down in tears. Charlotte went upstairs to Zozo's bedroom, where he was draping the aerial wire of his transmitter over the top of a wardrobe before making a transmission.

"What's the excitement?"

"Zozo, can you find me someone in Paris? Someone who can get me home?"

"Paris. My God. You want to be careful."

"I know. But do you have a name?"

"No. But I can probably get one."

"How soon?"

Zozo looked at her curiously.

"I'll see what I can do." When she was back in her cold room above the pharmacy, Charlotte said a prayer for Andre and Jacob.

In the morning, the internee whose job it was to clean the room would sprinkle water on the floor from an empty jam tin in which small holes had been pierced. A brush was provided, but for the dustpan he had to use a piece of card, from which the sweepings would then be thrown into a pail by the door. There were only two buckets for the use of the hundred or so occupants of the room; the other one was for food.

Levade was told by the head of the room that he would be on fatigues like everyone else. The most likely task would be the peeling of vegetables, which took place every morning in a room on the ground floor, not far from the main gate. It was tedious work, the man explained, but some people liked it because they could supplement their rations by secretly eating the potato peel when the gendarmes were not looking.

Levade felt lucky that illness had robbed him of his appetite. He heard the complaints of empty stomachs all day long, and witnessed a desperate bartering of half-carrots or small slices of bread for cigarettes. Since no communication was permitted with the outside world, the main source of tobacco the only hard currency in Drancy was the gendarmes.

A doctor on another staircase had advised those in a developed state of hunger and weakness that they could best conserve energy by lying all day on their beds. Word of this advice had reached Levade's room, and many of those not on fatigues would pass the long hours between roll calls immobile on their wooden bunks.

The doctor himself, it was noted, had been seen by the gendarmes rooting through a dustbin near the Red Castle, looking for scraps of potato peel from which he would scrupulously clean the cindery dust of the courtyard and other waste or slime before furtively consuming them. He had been a gynaecologist with a large practice in the Opera district of Paris, but this made no impression on the camp authorities, who decided that his scavenging should be punished by deportation on the next transport.

Hartmann managed to find a German paediatrician called Levi, who came to visit Levade one afternoon as it was growing dark. Levade was asleep when he arrived and was roused by his touch. He looked up to see two men staring down with concerned expressions, Levi and Hartmann, one on either side of the bunk. Levi spoke good French, though with the pronounced accent of his own country.

With no instruments, it was hard for him to diagnose Levade with any accuracy: he felt his forehead, took his pulse and inspected his throat; then he put his ear against his chest and made him cough into a cloth, where he examined what he brought up. He asked him how long he had been ill, how much weight he had lost and when he had last eaten.

"You must at least try to drink," Levi said.

"You have a cup? Get someone to bring you water from the pipe-there's nothing wrong with it. I'm going to see if I can find a place for you in the infirmary. It's difficult because there's dysentery at the moment among the little ones. But you need to be in bed."

"What's the matter with me?"

"I think you have pneumonia. Your lungs are very full."

"And what happens?"

"Nothing. Normally there's a crisis, a big fever, and then either you survive or not. There's no certain cure, even in the proper world."

Levade looked at the German's serious face, its dark features shadowed by fatigue. Clearly, he had not had the strength to pretend. Levade put his hand on the doctor's.

"Did you fight in the war?"

"Not this one," said Levi.

"The last one."

"That's what I meant."

"We " were considered proper Germans then. I resisted for as long as possible. I was making my way as a children's doctor in Hamburg. In the end I had to go. I was in France for two years. My brother Joseph was killed in a tunnel just before the end. But I survived. And you?"

Levade was smiling.

"I was there." He squeezed Levi's hand.

"We're old enemies." Hartmann said, "When did you come to France?"

"In 1940," said Levi.

"My wife and children left for the United States, but I stayed to work in the hospital for as long as possible.

Then I went to Paris, where I was safe for a time, until that big round-up in July. I managed to get down to Toulouse, but I was arrested there and sent to a camp. I was brought up here a month ago."

"And now?" said Levade.

"And now ... When the trains start again, I'll go where everyone goes." Hartmann said, "The wireless in London has said there's no work at the other end. They say we just get killed. Exterminated by the thousand."

"I don't believe that," said Levi with a twitch of German pride.

"There are always such rumours."

"And do you believe it?" said Levade.

Hartmann shrugged.

"Yes, I think I do. I've been told the trains are starting again any day. They're making a list now."

Levade began to cough and the other two men pulled over him such covers as there were.

Late that night Levade was awoken by the sound of screaming. A woman had thrown herself from a fourth floor window and had landed on the narrow flat roof that sheltered the walkway along the inside of the rectangle.

She had learned that her name was on the list of those due to be deported when the transports resumed on Thursday.

"Stupid bitch," said the man in the next bed to Levade.

"Now someone else'll have to go instead."

There was no sympathy for the dead woman or for the two men who died in the same way the next day.

That evening, at roll call, Levade leaned as usual for support on his neighbour, a young Rumanian who felt himself lucky to double his daily food ration in return for this slight service.

After an hour in the freezing evening Levade began to feel lightheaded. He was aware of a Parisian accent barking names, but his connection with reality seemed slender. He could see that the lights had come on in the rooms inside the buildings, and they reminded him of the lit houses he used to see when, on winter evenings in the small suburban town where he had grown up, his father Max Rutkowski brought him home from school on the handlebars of his bicycle. The air was so cold that he could barely breathe it in, yet he felt that what made him faint was not so much the thinness of the atmosphere as the thinness of time, as though he was at a great altitude-not of space, but of exhausted years. He slumped down into the arms of the Rumanian, who laid him on the ground as gently as he could. He answered Levade's name for him, and, when roll call was finally over, promised half his extra share of bread to a friend if he would help him carry the old man up to the room.

Later that night, before the lights were turned out, Hartmann brought Levade some soup he had saved and forced him to drink it. A dribble of the cold broth ran through the grey stubble of his chin. Hartmann kept a distance while Levade gurgled and spat, as though he did not wish to stand close to a man who, after all, had been too ill to wash for several weeks.

Hartmann took the empty cup and said, "I've got some news for you. They've put up the list of names for Thursday's transport and they've also put up a list of reserves. They always do this. It's about fifty extra names, in case of suicide or last minute changes, or in case they find more room. I'm sorry to tell you that your name's on the reserve list."

Levade, for all his feverish detachment, felt the cells of his body violently protest.

Hartmann said, "If I can get you to the infirmary, they'll probably take you off the list."

Levade was still fighting what felt like waves of freezing vertigo. When he could speak again he said, "It makes no difference. Leave my name on."

Charlotte was once more on a train. Her bundle of French francs was now almost at an end, but G Section's generous forethought would be enough to see her through at least until she made contact with the name in the rue Villaret de Joyeuse in Paris that Zozo had given her.

She had not had time to re-dye her hair before leaving, and there were traces of her own colour showing through at the roots. There was just enough dye left in the bottle Antoinette had given her in Ussel, and that night she would for the last time eliminate the gold and strawberry and barley shades that for the moment were concealed beneath Dominique's felt hat.

Quite how she would manage to find and speak to Levade, she was not sure. Presumably detention camps had facilities for visitors: she would simply go to the entrance and make her request. Doubtless, there would be some form-filling and delay. It was likely there would be set times to visit, or even particular days of the week, but since even criminals in prison were allowed to be visited, she could not imagine that an innocent man would be denied such a modest favour. Charlotte took out of her suitcase a sandwich made with fresh goose liver pate that Zozo had pressed on her as she left.

When the war was over, she would return and she would visit all the people who had so unquestioningly helped her Antoinette, Sylvie Cariteau, Zozo and little Annemarie.