Till We Meet Again (66 page)

Once she entered the house on the Rue de Lille, Delphine found that although everything should have conspired to
make her feel at home, she remained numb and cold with disgust. It was not nervousness that made her awkward, but revulsion. Although Georges, Bruno’s butler, whom she had known so well in former days, greeted her with unsurprised warmth as he took her wrap, she could not meet his eyes, and she surrendered the wrap with reluctance. Although Bruno himself, smiling with the success of his plan, was waiting in the entrance hall to offer her his protective arm as she mounted the steps to the salon, her feathery black chiffon gown weighed her down as if it were chain mail. Although General von Stern greeted her with old-fashioned courtesy, bowing correctly over her hand, her lips were incompliant, and her thin smile owed everything to her training.

At dinner, as Delphine sat as stiffly upright as an Edwardian princess, in the chair that she had occupied on so many other occasions, she looked around the table in bleak, profound astonishment. Was there nothing short of downright cannibalism that could mar the worldly surface of a Parisian dinner party, she asked herself?

Arletty, the charming, dark-haired actress, was holding forth in her droll and witty way about the pre-production problems of her next film,
Les Enfants du Paradis
, which was scheduled to be shot in Nice in a few months. At the other end of the perfectly appointed table, Sacha Guitry, who had directed Delphine in one of the several Napoleonic films she had made,
Le Destin Fabuleux de Désirée Clary
, was vainly trying to turn the conversation in his direction, while Albert Préjean, Junie Astor and Viviane Romance, who was about to star in
Carmen
with Jean Marais, all listened, fascinated, to Arletty’s description of the plans for the most expensive film that had ever been planned in the history of French filmmaking.

It could be 1937, Delphine thought, drinking from a wineglass that had once been Bruno’s, a glass whose very weight and shape were familiar to her hand, if the charming young officer whom everyone in Paris knew was Arletty’s lover had not worn a Nazi uniform. She could be having a gay dinner with a group of colleagues if Junie and Albert and Viviane hadn’t been among the small group of Continental’s many stars who had gone to Berlin last year, and met with Goebbels in a show of Franco-German unity. Only the thought of Armand kept her from rising from her seat and running down the stairs and leaving this house in which the “people of
her own world,” whom Bruno had promised her, were the most notorious collaborators of the cinema.

After dinner, Bruno guided her to the library where General von Stern sat apart, sipping cognac. He rose as Delphine gathered the folds of her skirt in one hand and sat down next to him, in the chair he indicated.

“I am a great admirer of your art, Mademoiselle,” he said eagerly, leaning forward to offer her a cigarette.

“No, thank you, General, I only smoke in films, when the script demands it.”

“You are under contract to Continental, I believe. Bravo, Mademoiselle.” He measured the tops of her breasts with his eyes, so swiftly that she almost missed his glance.

“Yes, General. I work for Continental,” she replied dryly.

“Greven is a good friend of mine. He has done wonders, has he not? he asked pleasantly, touching her bare arm lightly.

“I imagine the films are as good as can be expected,” Delphine answered, swaying gracefully toward the far edge of her chair and folding her hands tightly in her lap.

“General,” she began abruptly, unable to endure the small talk, “my brother told me—”

“I explained to the general that you have a certain concern, Delphine.” Bruno cut her short. “He understands your position.”

“As you know, Mademoiselle, we have always encouraged talent in the cinema,” General von Stern said with an expansive gesture. He smiled directly into her eyes.

“General, can you help me find Armand Sadowski?”
Delphine exclaimed, her voice too loud, her question too specific, her manner too abrupt, for the delicate transaction that Bruno had planned.

“I should like to be able to relieve your mind, Mademoiselle, if it is in my power,” the general said, his smile losing none of its insistence.

“My sister means that she would be deeply grateful for any information that would allow her to hope, General,” Bruno interjected, gripping Delphine’s shoulder.

“You do understand that such … hopeful … information is normally impossible to obtain?” the general asked. “Even for me?”

“My sister is aware of the problem, General. She realizes
how much she would owe you,” Bruno answered. “She understands that what she asks is most unusual, most irregular.”

“But will you try to find out where he is?” Delphine demanded brusquely, shaking off Bruno’s warning fingers with impatience.
“Can I hope?”

General von Stern pursed his lips thoughtfully as he inspected Delphine openly, from head to toe. He was pleased as he measured the depths of her desperation, and he allowed time to pass without a word, as noncommittal as if she were a shopkeeper and he was turning a piece of antique silver over in his hands, inspecting its hallmarks and trying to make up his mind if—at a certain price, to be sure—it might prove to be an interesting purchase.

“To be sure, nothing is impossible,” the general agreed at last, his smile returning. “It’s a question of time … most careful inquiries … a matter that demands tact … delicacy … my personal attention. I should have to ask favors … important favors … favors that would have to be repaid. Hope does not come easily in these days, alas. But then you are a woman of the world, are you not? My friend, your brother, has surely made that all quite clear to you. Meanwhile, it would please me a great deal to receive you here often, Mademoiselle de Lancel. Very often indeed. You illuminate every room you enter. You grace my home.”

“Thank you, General, but about Monsieur Sadowski—”

“I won’t forget our conversation.”

He touched her arm again. Dismissively. Commandingly. Caressingly.

“Do have a drop of this cognac. You haven’t touched your glass. Did your brother tell you that I have seen every single one of your films? No? Well, he was at fault. I’m one of your greatest fans. Perhaps … who knows?… I may have some news for you soon … if matters proceed as they should. Now, Mademoiselle de Lancel, what do you say to being my guest at the theater next week? Raimu is opening in
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
at the Comédie-Française. I have excellent seats—I hope I may count on you?”

Delphine made herself nod in false assent. No, she thought, no, you may not count on me, General, any more than I may count on you.

Bruno volunteered to escort Delphine home, and rode back with her, across the Seine, in silence. He told the driver to wait while he saw her safely into her house.

“Just a minute, Bruno,” Delphine said as she turned around, just inside the open door.

“I should be on my way. I don’t like to be out this late after curfew.”

“I won’t keep you long. What foul and filthy business are you doing with that general, Bruno?”

“How dare you! I do no business with him.”

“He treated me as if I were for sale. No, as if I’d already been sold and he was awaiting delivery.”

“General von Stern was perfectly correct. How did he offend your overdelicate sensibilities?”

“Bruno, you saw and you heard. Don’t pretend you don’t know what he expects from me.”

“Do you imagine that he would go to the trouble of finding your Jew for nothing? Are you that naïve? Are you so special that hope is
due
you? Of course you have to give him something in exchange.”

“Is that what you meant when you spoke of using my influence?” she said in such bitter contempt that he grew furious.

“You don’t deserve my help. You think that you can afford pride in times like these? Well, I have news for you, you stupid bitch, pride is for the conqueror, not for the vanquished. Do you think that your cunt is too precious to use to get what you want? You asked me to help you, you came begging to me, you were ready to do anything—’Help me, Bruno, help me, is there hope, Bruno, is there hope?’—and when I offer you a chance you’ll
never
get again,
never
, you throw it away. Let me tell you something, Delphine—if you want help, be prepared to pay for it! If you insist on hope, peddle yourself while you have a good customer!”

“His price is too high.” She threw the words in his face. “I’ll manage without it. But no price is too high for you, Bruno, is it? You still haven’t told me what stinking business the two of you are up to. You can’t merely be his pimp. What currency does he pay you in that’s so precious that you’d bring him your sister for his bed?”

“You’re insane! I won’t give you a second chance.”

“That’s the only good news I’ve had in a long time.” Delphine looked up at the darkness of Bruno’s handsome,
vicious face and laughed tauntingly before she pushed him with all her strength so that he stumbled backward as she slammed the door in his face.

In her defiance of Bruno, Delphine found a temporary exultation that carried her through the next few days, but soon her brave words haunted her. She’d said that she’d manage without hope, she’d even believed it while she said it, but hope could not be cast off like an unbecoming dress. Hope was her torture and it had to be endured like a fever, a constant, capricious fever that rose and fell without warning, an irrational, harrowing fever that no medication could control.

She would wake abruptly in the night, as if someone had called her name, and feel the unwanted infection of the hope she’d thrown away, flaming so high that her hair was wet with sweat, her neck and forehead dripping. The next morning, while she was having a costume fitting, she would feel the residue of that fragile, stubborn, foolish hope drain out of her like a hemorrhage, as if the fitter, with pins in her mouth, had suddenly been endowed with the power to condemn her to death. A song—Chevalier, on the radio, jauntily singing “The Symphony of Wooden Soles” in a bow to the fact that there was no more leather for shoes—could cause a forfeited, uninvited flare of hope to mount so high that she felt as if she could rise like a spark from the window of her bedroom and float over Paris. Yet, the same night, listening to Charles Trenet melodically lamenting “What Is There Left of Our Loves?” her heart would be invaded by a wave of vast, unexpected and total desolation, anguish such as she had never known, and she would pay ten times over for every moment of unreasonable, unbidden hope that had had its way with her.

Unsought, a sunrise or a new moon could sweep her into a moment of agonizing, groundless hope, yet she smelled despair in every dead flower, heard it in the cheep of a bird, saw it in dust on a staircase. Helplessly she was ground between the unreasoning welling-up of the hope she had vowed to do without, and the reality of bone-dry hopelessness, as peaceful as a grave, that she knew she should accept, but that she could not maintain.

Delphine became superstitious as she had never been before: she stopped reading newspapers, and while American troops debarked at Anzio and the Russians liberated Leningrad,
she consulted a dozen fortune-tellers; she sought out astrologers as the Germans occupied Hungary and the Luftwaffe lost four hundred and fifty planes in just one week in February of 1944. When General de Gaulle was named commander-in-chief of the armies of the Free French in April of the same year, Delphine was hunting throughout Paris for palmists and clairvoyants. The only hope she could endure was one she knew was clearly artificial. Only false prophets could ease the pain of her heart’s inextinguishable hope. She grew steadily thinner and more beautiful. She was on the border of madness.

In all the long history of Paris, no plague, no coronation, no revolution, no wave of popular adulation, no reign of terror, could compare to the mass hysteria and frenzy that gripped the city by mid-August of 1944. Only wild rumor and uncontrollable uncertainty were free to race like a pack of rabid dogs through the streets that lay electric with possibilities under the summer sun. Bridges were barricaded by German troops, movement should have been impossible, yet people swarmed everywhere, they knew not why, and disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. Anticipation, fear and bewilderment were on every face.

Liberation was coming! More than two months after the Americans, the English, the Canadians and the Free French had landed on the beaches of Normandy, at last liberation was coming! No, there would be no liberation! Eisenhower would bypass the city, intent on chasing the Germans toward the Rhine. Nothing could stop liberation! General Leclerc would disobey Eisenhower and march toward Paris!

From mouth to mouth the rumors spread; everything was believed, nothing was believed, yet exultation and the confused beginnings of insurrection were everywhere. The railroad workers went on strike. The Métro workers went on strike. The police recaptured their own headquarters even as a thousand people were routinely deported to a German concentration camp. Teenaged Frenchmen, newly armed with rifles, were massacred on street corners where they had played as children. The crack of gunshots—German or French, no one knew—was heard from roofs, from windows, from the street. Blood pooled on the sidewalks, on the street corners. Delirium bloomed unchecked in the summer air. What was happening? Did anyone know?