Léon and Louise (31 page)

The children themselves took a more realistic view of the dangers they faced every day. Being baptized Christians and the offspring of a police employee, they knew that they weren't typical German prey, and that the city's other potential threats tended to be fewer under the occupation than in peacetime. So they all devised their own ways of eluding their mother and taking the first steps along their own road to independence.

My Aunt Muriel, who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1987, was then seven years old. She had freckles and wore pale-green ribbons in her chestnut-brown hair, and she liked to spend her Sundays and Wednesday half holidays in the concierge's lodge with Madame Rossetos, who dandled her on her lap for hours on end, fed her sweets, and told her eye-rollingly horrific tales of love, murder and the torments of hell. Madame Rossetos provided Muriel with the affection she didn't get from her mother, and the little girl consoled her for the perfidy of her daughters, who hadn't shown a sign of life since they left. Shortly before five p.m. Madame Rossetos always went to the dresser and poured herself a small glass of advocaat. And because Muriel was such a dear little girl, she got a thimbleful too. She didn't like it much at first, but she soon learnt to appreciate its effect.

My Uncle Robert, who later worked for a small employment agency in Lille, installed a rabbit hutch in the attic and spent his days gathering greenstuff from mossy gutters and overgrown backyards throughout the Latin Quarter to feed his rapidly multiplying livestock. He handled the slaughtering himself and delivered the carcasses to his customers oven-ready. One rabbit a month he relinquished to his mother; the rest he sold on the black market. Robert died at the wheel of his Renault 16 one rainy morning in September 1992, when he lit a distracting cigarette on the Route Nationale between Chartres and Le Mans and aquaplaned off the road.

Thirteen-year-old Yves, who later became a doctor and still later abandoned medicine for theology, distressed his parents by volunteering for the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, Vichy's paramilitary youth movement. He was issued with a black uniform, combat boots and white spats, learned the Marshal's speeches by heart, and spent weeks marching through Fontainebleau Forest with rucksack, forage cap and hunting knife.

Nineteen-year-old Michel, who was to go down in history as the inventor of Renault's lockable filler cap, was waiting for a place at engineering school. He killed time by taking daylong walks through the city in search of some escape from the prison he felt his life to be. He nursed an unspoken contempt for his father's self-absorption and his mother's opportunistic fight for survival. Although he knew he lacked the makings of a martyr for a good cause, he had no wish to be a conformist. He had wanted to leave school a few months before matriculating because all the girls in his class – every last one – had opted to take German, not English, as their first foreign language. To dissuade his eldest son from dropping out, Léon for once brought paternal authority to bear. He initially tried to convince him of the value of a traditional education and pointed out that most of the boys in his class had entered for the English exam, and then, when these arguments failed, simply bribed him with 500 francs.

Born in the second year of the war, Philippe – my father – was still tied to his mother's apron strings except on Sunday afternoons, when Yvonne slept alone in the darkened bedroom and would tolerate no child near her. Then he went with Muriel to Madame Rossetos, sat on his sister's lap while she, in turn, sat on the concierge's, and listened to her gruesome stories. And because he was such a dear little boy and kept so nice and quiet, he was allowed a sip of Madame Rossetos' advocaat. Sophisticated but unable to cope with life and a lover of women but incapable of being faithful to them, Philippe was sentenced to solitude by his own charm and ultimately condemned to death by alcoholism.

Léon continued to live the life of a hermit. He went to work and fulfilled his paternal responsibilities; that apart, he took refuge in his floating hideaway. As luck would have it, Jules Caron had had a predilection for 19th-century Russian literature, so the bookshelf was filled with works by Tolstoy and Turgenev, Dostoievsky and Lermontov, Chekov, Gogol and Goncharov. Léon read them all while smoking a pipe and drinking red wine, which didn't stupefy him so much as induce an agreeable state of metaphysical well-being.

He divided his time between reading in a leisurely fashion and looking out of the porthole at the reflections on the surface of the basin, the seasonally changing colours of the plane trees, the passage of the stars, and the succession of rain, sunshine and fog, all of which were equally to his taste. Punctually at seven every evening he turned on the radio, put his ear to the loudspeaker, and, as if the announcer's voice were a delicacy not to be wasted, absorbed the news on the BBC. That was how he heard about Stalingrad and the landing at Anzio, Operation Overlord and the night raids on Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden.

He was appalled to find that hatred had grown up inside him like a tree during the thousand days the occupation had lasted; now that tree was bearing poisonous fruit. He had never dreamt that he would rub his hands at the news that Charlottenburg had been gutted by fire and had never thought it possible that he would loudly rejoice at the death of 3000 women and children in a single night. It shocked him how ardently he hoped that the bombs would continue to rain down, night after night, until not a single German was left alive on God's good earth.

His hatred helped him to survive, but he also underwent some unsettling experiences. He once witnessed a scene that made him feel profoundly ashamed because it shook his hatred. One afternoon in the Métro he was sitting opposite a Wehrmacht soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder. At Saint-Sulpice a young man with a yellow star on his overcoat got in. The soldier stood up and silently gestured to the Jew, who must have been about his own age, to take his seat. The Jew hesitated and looked round helplessly, then sat down on the vacant seat without a word and, probably in shame and despair, buried his face in his hands. The soldier turned away and stared at the blackness outside the window with a face like stone. Meanwhile, silence had descended on the carriage. The Jew was sitting immediately opposite Léon, so close that their knees were almost touching. Neither the soldier nor the Jew got out at the next station or the one after that. Their journey together seemed interminable. The Jew kept his hands over his face the whole time, the soldier stood stiffly beside him. The train stopped and started, stopped and started. At last came the station where the soldier turned on his heel and made his way out on to the platform. Silence persisted when the doors closed behind him. No one ventured to utter a word. The Jew kept his hands over his face. Léon could see that he was wearing a wedding ring, and that the corners of his eyes, most of which were obscured by his forefingers, were twitching.

Summer 1944 was fine and warm – an invitation to bathe, but the beaches of Normandy and the Côte d'Azur were inaccessible because of the Allied invasion, so the inhabitants of Paris stayed at home and used the Seine as a lido. The fourth of August was the hottest day of the year so far. Asphalt melted, horses hung their heads, and anyone who couldn't avoid going out kept to the narrow strips of pavement shaded by buildings.

One evening, when Léon was passing the entrance of the Musée Cluny on his way home after spending his usual couple of hours after work on the boat, a man was standing in the shadows beneath the archway with his flat cap pulled down low over his face. Scenting danger, Léon walked on faster and deliberately averted his gaze.

‘Psst!' said the man.

Léon walked on.

‘Fine evening, isn't it?'

Léon stepped off the pavement and prepared to turn down the Rue de la Sorbonne.

‘Hey, stop!'

Léon walked on.

‘Hands up! Don't move!'

Léon halted abruptly and raised his hands.

The man behind him laughed. ‘Relax, Léon, I'm only joking.'

Hesitantly, Léon lowered his hands and turned round, then stepped back on to the pavement and scrutinized the man. He had clean-cut features and piercing eyes, and he looked vaguely familiar.

‘I'm sorry, do we know each other?'

‘I've brought your four hundred francs back.'

‘My four hundred francs?'

‘Eight hundred times fifty centimes, don't you remember? I wanted to get to Jaurès bus station and you helped me.'

‘Martin?'

‘Didn't recognize me, did you? Yes, I'm your personal tramp, the embodiment of your clear conscience.'

‘How long is it, three years?'

‘We guessed the war would last three or four years. Not bad, eh?'

‘It isn't over yet.'

‘But it soon will be. Let's walk on, I'll keep you company for a little way.'

The man looked ten years younger than he had the last time they met. His eyes were as clear as his complexion, he didn't smell of red wine, and he seemed to have lost all his body fat. Léon had noticeably aged in comparison, he had to admit, and his hours aboard the boat had probably left him smelling of red wine.

‘How long have you been back in Paris?'

‘A few days. It won't be long now, as you know.'

‘I don't know a thing.'

‘Of course you do, every child does. The Americans are already in Rouen, things are brewing up in Corsica, and we ourselves have five thousand men in the city.'

‘Who's we?'

Martin pulled a piece of white cloth from his jacket pocket and held it up. It was an armband with the letters FFL stencilled on it in black.

‘At last,' said Léon.

‘The balloon could go up any time, possibly next week.'

‘Just as long as the Germans don't do what they did in Warsaw.'

‘We'll take care,' said Martin. ‘But so should you, Léon.'

‘Why?'

‘The day of reckoning will soon be here. We plan to tweak a few people's ears.'

‘Good for you.'

‘It'll be summary justice, and we won't be squeamish. We won't be holding any coffee parties or discussion groups beforehand.'

‘I see.'

‘I'm not sure you do,' said Martin. ‘You really ought to look out for yourself. People are talking about you, did you know?'

‘No.'

‘They're talking about your handouts of coffee from the SS. They're talking about your boat and your black market activities.'

‘But I – '

‘I know, but coffee's coffee and a boat's a boat. People are going to get it in the neck for things like that in days to come, and there won't be time for any fine distinctions. Our comrades' blood is up, you've got to understand that.'

‘So is mine, and you of all people should know – '

‘Yes, but the others don't. They'll be deaf to any fine distinctions, as I say. In the days ahead they'll dispense rough justice and ask questions afterwards. That's why you must make yourself scarce for a week or two. Right away, until things simmer down. Then you can come back and explain about the coffee.'