Page 15 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

14

Trying to Squeeze a Horse into a Handbag

France and Spain, December 1941

All night we throw around ideas about how to smuggle me over the border. I can’t hide in the trunk of Schaerrer’s car; they always check the trunk, the back seats, and the floor. Finally I ask the one thing I’ve been praying I wouldn’t have to. “How big is the diplomatic mailbag?”

Marguerite stares at me as if I’ve just asked Schaerrer for the size of something far more intimate. “You cannot be serious,” she says.

Schaerrer grimaces. “Two feet by four feet. Too small to fit a person inside. Besides, the road over the Pyrenees is closed for winter. To get to Spain, I have to put the Citro?n on a flatbed carriage at Urdos. Even if you could somehow fit inside the bag, you’d have to stay in it for the two hours it takes them to hoist the car onto the train and for it to cross the border to Canfranc. When I say it would hurt, I’m making the biggest understatement of the year.”

“I imagine being burned with cigarettes hurts, too,” I say.

We’re all quiet for a moment, then Marguerite shakes her head. “You’re mad. But that’s why I love you.”

It’s exactly what I need to hear—a few words of faith to bolster my own.

Schaerrer empties the bag of official correspondence.

I’m five feet six, far from tall, but I might as well be a giant when it comes to trying to cram myself inside. The bag comes up to my breasts when I stand in it. I try to crouch down, but it’s too narrow.

Marguerite starts to laugh. “I know it’s not funny, but it’s like trying to squeeze a horse into a handbag.”

We’re all laughing by the time I’ve wriggled into twenty different and increasingly comical positions. After ten more minutes, I say despairingly, “I’m just too big.”

Schaerrer’s expression becomes concentrated. “Maybe…”

He pauses, examines me and the bag. “I once saw a circus performer fit himself inside a bag a bit like this one by pushing his feet into the corners, then squatting right down to the ground. He wrapped his arms around his shins and curled his forehead onto his knees.”

“Here goes,” I say pessimistically, standing with legs akimbo before squatting down as low as I can. My hip groans.

But I’m almost there.

I press myself lower, hip shrieking, sweat sliding down my nose, my back. I only need to be another centimeter smaller. How?

Marguerite raises an eyebrow at me. I know what she’s thinking.

I climb out of the bag. “Nobody is to talk about this. Ever.”

I remove my clothes.

Standing there in my underwear, I feel barer than if I were nude. I’ve had this brassiere for three years. In pre-ration times, when new lingerie could be bought at Galeries Lafayette as easily as bread from the boulangerie, I’d only wear one this old on laundry day. But I’m about to wear it—pink silk faded to almost white, straps frayed, lace torn in two places—across a border guarded by police who want to arrest me.

How do you hold your head high in front of your enemy when you’re wearing your wash-day bra?

You don’t get caught.

Which means pretending I’m wearing shocking-pink Schiaparelli. It means stepping back into the sack, tucking my feet into the corners, squatting, curving my shoulders around my forlorn bra, ignoring my hip, and praying that my head is inside my mailbag prison.

Schaerrer tugs the top of the sack, then gives it one good, hard wrench. “It closes.”

But my windpipe is crushed, my lungs screaming for air. My hip is weeping.

“She’s going to die in there after half an hour!” Marguerite protests.

A scraping sound. Then a metal blade appears an inch from my face. Schaerrer cuts three holes near my mouth. It makes only the smallest difference. But Coustenoble is being used as an ashtray, so the least I can do is crouch in a bag for a couple of hours.

“Carry a pair of scissors,” Schaerrer says grimly as I climb out gasping, hand pressed to my hip. “In case you start to suffocate.”

“Maurice will kill me when he finds out I’ve let you do this,” Marguerite whispers.

“Are you sure?” Schaerrer asks me.

“No,” I tell him. “But isn’t that the way we live now?”

—

I stay in the passenger seat of the Citro?n until we reach the woods outside Urdos, where I take off my clothes and cram myself into the bag. Once I’m curled as tightly as a hedgehog—and feeling as uncomfortable as if that creature’s pins were pressing into my lungs, my hip, and my skull—Schaerrer seals the bag. He piles four spare tires up beside it on the back seat to disguise its strange shape.

I can do this.

My hip shrieks in disagreement. My lungs join in.

But I have the promise of freedom in two hours. Coustenoble and Vallet don’t have any such promise. And I’ll never be able to see my children again if the police arrest me and the British hear nothing from us and withdraw their support and Alliance becomes something I took over from Navarre and ruined. I owe it to him, but most of all to my dream of walking into my apartment to the sound of feet running toward me, and two sweet voices calling, Maman!

I imagine that future so hard the pain settles to a hum. Until one of the tires shifts, pressing the bag’s metal seal onto my head. I might be less than five feet tall by the time I get out of the bag—if I can even walk.

Living with congenital hip dysplasia means I’ve known pain before, the feeling of being devoured by it, that not a single sense works except the receptors that draw each spasm closer. I repeat like a mantra, Two hours. Two hours .

The car stops and Schaerrer converses with the stationmaster.

“The morning train just left,” the stationmaster says cheerily. “We moved the timetable forward an hour. We’ll have coffee while you wait for the next train.”

“The next train?” Schaerrer asks, panic in his voice for the first time ever.

“It leaves in eight hours.”

Eight hours!

I’m going to die.

The panic is more suffocating than the crush of my windpipe. I haul images of Christian and Béatrice into my head, cradling those pictures in my mind as tenderly as I’d once cradled my children in my arms while the Citro?n is hoisted up. It sways precariously in the wind, a pendulum marking the time remaining before I’m asphyxiated, paralyzed, caught. Then it’s deposited with a thump onto the carriage bed.

The long wait begins.

Cold December mountain air creeps inside my car. I feel it in my feet first; they numb rapidly, then my hands, too. I don’t count the hours because there are always too many left to endure. I breathe in as much air as I can, force my brain to reconnect to each finger and toe. I pretend my hip isn’t attached to my body, that the agony is outside me. Most of all I remember—like fever dreams—my family. Mother. Sister. Children. But their outlines blur, and blackness is threatening my vision when I hear Schaerrer arguing with the stationmaster, who won’t let him ride in the Citro?n once the train departs.

“It’s too dangerous,” the stationmaster says. “Sometimes the ropes snap on the curves and the cars get thrown off.”

Thus another way to die is added to the already long list.

I document them all: hypothermia, suffocation, decapitation from one of the tires on the seat beside me, the crushing of my body as it’s flung into the side of the mountain. At least the last two would be quick.

I’m so cold I’ve stopped shivering. I know it’s a bad sign. I try to move a toe. Just one.

I can’t.

Then the train starts to move!

Only two hours left. I’m through the worst of it.

Remember my children, ignore my hip . I repeat the words over and over, a mantra to get me through.

But just when I’m so close, my body starts to betray me. My breath slows. My heart rate, too. I can’t feel the pain in my back, my hip, or my neck, not anymore.

I don’t have another two hours left in me.

As if through water, I hear footsteps. Then the sound of the car door being wrenched open. I’m so far gone I’m hallucinating. But no—the bag is being untied and my head is off my knees and now I’m gulping in freezing air like it’s champagne.

“Are you all right?” Schaerrer asks, eyes wild, militarily tidy hair rumpled like Tintin’s. “I thought I was going to have to tell everyone I’d murdered you.” He grabs a blanket from the trunk and tucks it around me.

“Not yet,” I mumble.

He tips Armagnac into my mouth and I want to bathe in its warmth. My eyes adjust and I see that we’re in the Col du Somport, the tunnel leading to Spain. I wish we were already at the other end.

“I jumped from carriage to carriage to get back here,” Schaerrer says, and I actually manage a half smile.

“So you’re practicing for Hollywood and me for the Moulin Rouge,” I say thinly, referring to my underclothes.

He laughs, then claps a hand over his mouth. “Sorry.”

I shrug. “If I was in your shoes rather than my bare feet, I’d be laughing, too.”

“Only an hour to go,” he promises.

Sixty minutes. Three thousand, six hundred seconds too many.

I’ve never wanted to do anything less than curl back up and feel the bag seal behind my neck. After that, I count every single second the way an insomniac tallies sheep—but I do it to stop myself from drifting into darkness.

I’ve reached one thousand when I wonder if I’ll be able to walk after this. My hip is a wildfire. But a hip isn’t the same as a life. I only have to get out of this with my life.

At last the train slows.

As my car is lifted up and set down on the ground, my hip spasms so much I think I might vomit. The tires shift, curling me into a still tighter ball, my windpipe so squashed the panic crests again. I have the scissors in my hand, the scissors I told myself I wouldn’t use because it would mean Schaerrer’s being marched off to prison. But right now I want to stab not just the bag but myself.

That’s when the car door opens.

A flashlight waves back and forth as the car is inspected by customs officers.

Suddenly I’m glad of the tire on top of me, making me even more invisible.

The flashlight retreats. The car door slams.

“We just need to get out of the station and into the woods, and then you can climb out,” I hear Schaerrer say.

“I can’t,” I whisper. I haven’t eaten or drunk for ten hours. My hip is a living beast of agony. I can’t remember the last time I was able to move my fingers or my toes.

The whirlpool comes for me and I let myself fall into it.

—

The sound of water. Then cold, right through to my bones.

Bones . I have bones. That means I’m alive.

Pain, so much pain.

I want the whirlpool again.

But there’s a light above me. The moon. Sky. Night glitter, stars. And Schaerrer’s face, ravined with worry.

“Thank God,” he says. “A decent cigarette and you’ll be fine.”

Yes, we’re an alliance of adventurous optimists, thinking a cigarette will cure all.

I can’t move my mouth or my head, so I can’t disagree, nor throw a tire at him, which I’d quite like to do. Instead, I swallow more Armagnac. It revives me enough to see that I’m propped against a tree by a stream, blanket thrown around me. “I’m never doing that again.”

“At the risk of sounding like I suffered more than you, I don’t think I can do it again, either.” Schaerrer takes a seat beside me. “I aged a thousand years over that ten hours of imagining you dead. I couldn’t decide whether Coustenoble would shoot me or if Navarre would burst out of jail and do it, or if the whole of Alliance would tie me up in the mailbag and throw me into the sea.”

Every muscle protests my attempts to make something besides my mouth move. “Well, I still can’t walk, so you might yet have some explaining to do.”

“Here.” Schaerrer puts the cigarette to my lips and it tastes better than Christmas dinner. Then he carries me back to the car, which isn’t even an indignity, but a necessity. I could no sooner walk than a newborn could run.

When the car draws up at the British embassy in Spain, I still can’t straighten my legs. I try to open the door, but even that small movement makes me want to tear my hip off my body. Schaerrer reaches in and lifts me up again, ever so gently.

“There are at least two flights of stairs,” he says matter-of-factly.

“I suppose it means my entrance will forever after be remembered.” I offer him a flicker of who I’m meant to be, Marie-Madeleine, intrepid leader. “At least I’m now wearing clothes.”

We’re both laughing as we enter the embassy.

I have a couple of days to recover the ability to use my limbs before Crane—the man from MI6 whom Navarre met in London—alerted by the British embassy staff of the sudden appearance of POZ55, arrives. I watch the staff send the message, so I know they haven’t mentioned my gender; they aren’t privy to our clandestine work and don’t know it’s a secret.

But it soon won’t be.

Once in a room with Crane, there’ll be no hiding that I’m a woman. I might have almost killed myself for nothing. Because MI6 could easily refuse to work with a woman.

Then it really will be the end for Alliance.

—

As soon as I can walk, I do something irresponsible. I let the embassy staff take me out to have my hair and nails done; buy me cosmetics, lingerie, a black silk dress, more new shoes, and stockings, too. My sore hip and worsened limp hide, almost forgotten, beneath new and stylish clothes that aren’t faded or frayed. I contemplate tossing my old pink bra in the trash. But I can’t make myself do it—the Nazis have been in France just a year and a half, but the habit of keeping everything in case it can be mended, repurposed, or resewn is already as established as the orange tree I planted in my courtyard in Paris.

I feed my hip two aspirin, then go outside. It’s so quiet, like Paris when I visited in April, as if all over the world, only the echo of the grand symphony that was once Europe remains. Spain is officially neutral, but Franco loves Hitler, so swastikas drip like blood from buildings that bear the wounds of the Civil War’s gunshots as I make my slow and careful way to the Prado, ears straining for birdsong that never plays.

At the museum, I avoid crucifixions and Goya, sit on a bench where I stare at cherubs and gentle nudes. But on the walls beside them are other paintings, history rendered in oils—stories of war, of the weak defeating the strong, stories of lovers weeping.

I should have gone to a bar.

It takes longer to walk home. My hip’s defeated the aspirin. I’m moving so slowly I can see myself in detail in the shop windows, and if I look past the limp, the woman in those windows seems so young. And she is. Just thirty-two years old.

My mother once told me that this decade would be one of the loveliest. My children would be old enough to sleep through the night, and I’d fall in love with them as people, rather than loving them with that more animal instinct to protect them. I’d have time to go out with my husband, and we’d rediscover romance and tenderness and passion.

I didn’t cry in the mailbag, but tears trickle from my eyes now, because yes, this decade is lovely—and monstrous, too. In this decade, my soul is different because of an alliance of people who walk right up to danger and stand there, facing it.

Which means I can no longer avoid thinking about tomorrow’s meeting with Crane. I owe it to everyone in Alliance not only to make sure the British get over the fact that I’m a woman, but also to show them how deeply I understand this network. There’s been a disaster in Paris and in Pau. But that means we need to strengthen what we’ve started so we grow like the artemisia plants in Morocco’s desert—stealthily, unexpectedly, leaves nondescript until transformed into green, sparkling absinthe.

We’ve been stealthy. But we haven’t yet dared to sparkle.

Maybe it’s time to tell the British what I want.

Do I dare?

I carry the question with me as I make my halting way back, wishing suddenly and acutely for someone with whom I could share my worries. Someone who might hold me in a gentle embrace; someone who might take the weight from my hip.

The only person with whom I’ve shared what truly drives me is a dark-haired man I met in Vichy, who’s now in a prison cell. A man I hardly know, and who’d probably be less than what I’ve made him into if we were ever to meet again.

I have only myself. So I’ll just have to dare. The same way I did when I left Morocco eight years ago.