Léon and Louise (19 page)

Three days later, on Friday, 14 June – in other words, the day on which Louise sent him a first sign of life – Léon awoke long before dawn as usual. He lay there listening to the ticking of the alarm clock and his wife's regular breathing until the morning light showing through the sun-bleached linen curtains changed from pale blue to orange and pink. Then he slipped out of bed, bundled up his clothes, and tiptoed out into the passage, inadvertently making a noise because some small change fell out of his trouser pocket. In the kitchen he lit the gas and put some water on, then washed and shaved at the sink. When he went to fetch the
Aurore
from the landing, he was surprised to find that it wasn't lying on the doormat as usual. This had never happened before.

For want of anything else to read, Léon took the last three days' papers from the hall table and went back into the kitchen, where he opened the first of them and read an article he'd previously missed on sheep farming in the Outer Hebrides. Shortly before seven o'clock he buttered ten slices of bread for the whole family, his customary chore. The first to make a bleary-eyed appearance was his eldest son Michel, now sixteen and at secondary school. While Léon was pouring two cups of coffee, Yves, the next in age, tottered off to the lavatory.

Léon put a saucepan of milk on the stove. A little later, when Yvonne came into the kitchen holding four-year-old Muriel in her arms and leading eight-year-old Robert by the hand, he found himself hemmed in between the stove and the sink. Having kissed his wife on the corner of the mouth and the two youngest children on the top of their heads, he took his second cup of coffee and retired to the armchair beside the living-room window, which had a nice view of the Rue des Écoles and the École Polytechnique.

He had only just sat down when he caught sight of a soldier who had made himself comfortable on a bench in the little park outside. Blinking in the morning sunlight, he was eating an apple and a big slice of bread with his legs stretched out in front of him. His helmet was lying beside him on the bench, the butt of his rifle planted on the gravel path. A box camera was hanging from his neck by a strap, an absurdly large holster attached to his belt.

‘Yvonne!' called Léon, retreating behind the curtain so as not to be seen from outside. ‘Please come and take a look.'

‘What is it?'

‘That soldier over there.'

‘Yes, how odd.'

‘Don't stand in front of the window.'

‘Where would he have got that apple?'

‘What about the apple?'

‘At this time of year there isn't an apple to be had anywhere in Paris. The new crop doesn't come on the market till late July.'

‘I'm talking about his helmet and his uniform.'

‘Look, now he's getting out another apple. And feeding bread to the pigeons – real white bread made with wheat flour.'

‘The uniform, Yvonne.'

‘The stuff we eat is like sawdusty cardboard – you can hardly call it bread – and that fellow's feeding good bread to the pigeons. He'll be eating meat, next. If we want meat we have to hunt squirrels in the Luxembourg Gardens.'

‘The squirrels have been exterminated, I heard.'

‘All the better.'

‘But forget about apples and squirrels, Yvonne. Look at his uniform.'

‘What about it?'

‘It's grey. Ours are khaki.'

‘But... that's impossible!'

‘I'll go to the baker's and scout around.'

The nearest two bread shops were shut, but a tour of the Latin Quarter left Léon in no doubt: the Wehrmacht had tiptoed into Paris in the course of that early summer's night. Not a shot had been fired, not an order shouted or a bomb dropped. At dawn the Germans had simply materialized like some recurrent seasonal event – like the arrival of swallows from Africa at the end of May, or the Beaujolais nouveau with which landlords swindled tourists in the autumn, or the latest novel by Georges Simenon.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world, they had introduced themselves into the urban scenery and were now standing around with their steel helmets and Mauser pistols, queueing up like tourists at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, sitting in the Métro, studying their Baedeker guides with Agfa cameras suspended from their necks in brown leather cases, and photographing each other's grinning faces as they stood on their own or in groups outside Notre Dame and Sacré-Cœur.

Battle-hardened Panzer grenadiers gallantly helped elderly ladies to board buses, tipsy infantrymen loosened their belts as they ate steak and
frites
in the pavement cafés, complimented the chefs and tipped the waiters generously. Dapper Luftwaffe officers, who might just as well have been fobbed off with tomato juice, exhausted the stocks of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and many of the newcomers, being Austrians, spoke remarkably good French. All that rendered the occupying power unpleasantly conspicuous was its insistence on holding a big parade in the Champs-Élysées, of all places, at precisely half-past twelve every day.

‘They're all over the place,' Léon whispered to Yvonne when he returned with two baguettes. He kept his back to the children so as not to alarm them. ‘I saw two sitting in a car in the Place Champollion and one drinking coffee on the terrace in the Rue Valette. There are huge swastika flags hanging from the Panthéon and the Sorbonne. On the way back I actually bumped into one coming round a corner, and you know what? He apologized. In French, what's more.'

‘What do we do now?' asked Yvonne.

Léon shrugged his shoulders. ‘I must go to the lab. The children must go to school.'

‘You're going to work?'

‘Duty calls, Yvonne. We already discussed this.'

‘We could escape.'

‘Where to, Cherbourg? For one thing, the Germans will soon be everywhere, if they aren't already. For another, the police would promptly arrest me – the French police, too, not even the Germans. Thirdly, if I went to jail you and the children would be out on the street within a month, starving.'

‘We could hide here in the flat.'

‘Where? Under the sofa?'

‘Léon...'

‘What?'

‘Let's think it over.'

‘What's to think about? There's nothing to think about. You can only think things over if you've got some information, and we don't know a thing. We can't see or hear anything, we've no idea what's going on. We don't know what happened yesterday, and we know even less about what's going to happen tomorrow.'

‘At least we can see a bit,' said Yvonne, pointing out of the window.

‘The soldier, you mean? A Wehrmacht soldier eating two apples, one after the other, and enjoying the sun? All right, what does that tell us?'

‘That the Germans are here.'

‘Yes, and we can also hazard a guess that the fellow will get diarrhoea if he eats a third apple. But apart from that it tells us nothing. We don't know how numerous the Germans are and what they intend to do, settle in or move on, or whether the British will come to our aid or the Germans have already landed in England, or if Paris will be spared or razed to the ground. We don't know a thing. Events have overtaken us, that's all. There's no point in thinking or arguing about them.'

‘But things could get dangerous here. For us and the children.'

‘They could, but blindly rushing off somewhere is almost certainly the most dangerous thing we could do. That's why the children must clean their teeth and wash their faces. I'm off. There's a lot of work waiting for me at the lab.'

At that moment a loudspeaker van came down the street. On behalf of the German authorities, it informed the city's inhabitants that they were to remain in their homes for the next forty-eight hours, and that France would observe German time from now on, so all clocks should be put forward one hour.

L
éon didn't find it unpleasant that his internal clock woke him one hour later than usual. The
Aurore
wasn't lying on the doormat the next morning either, so his time at the kitchen table would have dragged in any case. It felt good for once, not roaming around in the dark like a zombie but lying in bed for as long as his wife and children in the unaccustomed silence that had descended on the city. Besides, the two days' house arrest decreed by the occupying power was long enough in any case. The Le Gall family devoted them to reading, eating and playing cards. Michel, the eldest boy whose present resemblance to the boy Léon had been in the days of his boat trips on the English Channel was positively absurd, spent hours twiddling the radio's tuning knob in search of news when all the stations were playing nothing but music. Léon and Yvonne sought to disguise their concern by being exaggeratedly cheerful and aroused the children's suspicions by trying to kiss them at the most inappropriate moments.

Whenever Léon went to the window, Michel abandoned the radio and came and stood beside him with his hands clasped behind his back, chewing his lower lip in silence and looking down at the street. Now and then a German army lorry would drive past, or sometimes an ambulance, hearse or police car, and once even a sewage tanker going about its indispensable business.

It was so quiet outside that, when a patrol marched down the street, the tramp of boots could be heard through closed windows. And because, after two months of almost uninterrupted sunshine, the sky that day was veiled in cloud, the birds had fallen silent as if in obedience to German orders.

Every two or three hours, Léon would leave the confines of the flat and sneak downstairs. He ventured out on to the pavement and peered right and left, listened to the silence and sniffed the air. But he never saw, heard or smelt anything that conveyed even the least idea of what was happening in the outside world.

On the third morning, house arrest was over and Paris came to life again. At dawn Léon wondered which would be wiser, to go to work as prescribed or spend another day in the haven of the flat. He could hear a faint hum of motor traffic and the occasional clip-clop of horses' hoofs. So as not to wake Yvonne, he tiptoed to the window and drew the curtain aside. A taxi drove past, followed by a Léclanché van and a woman on a bicycle. A hairy youth in a sleeveless vest trundled a mobile vegetable stall over the cobblestones.

But there was still no evidence of the war. No dark clouds of smoke stained the sky, no armoured vehicles were standing in the Rue des Écoles, the magnolias were flowering in the park across the way, and there were no trenches, soldiers or signs of combat and devastation to be seen.

‘The Germans are making themselves invisible,' thought Léon. ‘Either that or they've moved on. It doesn't look dangerous out there, anyway.'

He decided to go to work, calculating that it would probably be more dangerous for him to stay at home and risk a court martial for dereliction of duty. That morning he shaved a trifle more carefully than usual and put on clean underwear and his new tweed suit; if anything happened to him he wanted to cut a good figure in hospital, prison or the morgue. He wrote a note for Yvonne while drinking his coffee in the kitchen, then took his hat and coat from the hooks in the hall and closed the front door quietly behind him.

On the ground floor he noticed that Madame Rossetos' glass door was ajar. He paused to listen but heard nothing, so he sidled nearer and called the concierge's name. Her gloomy abode was deserted. In one corner stood a broom, and beside it a pail with a floorcloth draped over it to dry. Where once Sergeant Rossetos' photograph had hung, the floral wallpaper displayed a conspicuous pale rectangle. The air smelt of braised onions and pungent cleaning fluids, and Madame Rossetos' eternal apron was hanging on a hook behind the door. On the stove, which was unlit, lay a big bunch of keys and beside it a handwritten note:

Please destroy all incoming mail unopened, I rely on your discretion. You can all go to hell as far as I'm concerned, you idle, self-important nit-pickers. Mesdames and Messieurs, please accept my most respectful salutations.

Josianne Rossetos,

concierge of No. 14

Rue des Écoles from

23 October 1917 to

6 a.m. on 16 June 1940.

To Léon's surprise, the refrigerator was overflowing with tissue samples – something that had never happened before in his fourteen years' service. When he commented on this to a colleague, the latter shrugged and pointed out that a clothes locker had been converted into a makeshift refrigerator, and that this was also chock-full.

The reason was that, in the two days since the Germans marched in, the medical officers of Paris had discovered 384 cases where death by self-administered poison was suspected, all the deceased being assumed to have left life's dinner table to avoid a bitter last course of humiliation, mortification and anguish. The doctors had cut a hen's-egg-sized lump out of each liver and sent it off to the Police Judiciaire's Scientific Service in a preserving jar. Léon Le Gall and his colleagues would spend three weeks testing this backlog of human tissue. They detected 312 instances of cyanide, 23 of strychnine, 38 of rat poison, and 3 of curare. Only in the case of one sample did the despairing man's method of suicide remain a mystery, and none yielded a negative result.