Page 32 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

31

The Fight We Have to Have Is Here

London, August–September 1943

With English friends or French friends now in Britain, several nights a week Magpie, Léon, and I go out. I rediscover the pleasure of dancing, of being held in Léon’s arms for hours, our bodies moving to the music of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” a song about two lovers who meet in a town paved with stars.

September, the month when they’re returning to France, arrives too soon. As the moon swells from half to gibbous, the nightmares begin. Pink heather. Léon and Magpie, the landing field, the glorious flowers. The Nazi gloating, We’ve arrested Faye.

I sit up in bed too quickly, head spinning like a hangover. The phone is ringing. Dansey’s coming to see me.

My nausea climbs into my throat.

“We’re moving you to a cottage for security reasons,” Dansey tells me as soon as he’s seated. “Somehow everyone in England knows that both the head of Alliance and its chief of staff are here. I can’t risk some kind of attack.”

“If you’re moving me into a cottage,” I reply, voice flat, “it means you’re not planning to let me go back to France any time soon.”

“You can’t go now,” he says with absolute finality. “By remaining here, you can get the overall view essential for organizing the network. This winter is going to be terribly tough. The Nazis are stepping up their drive against the Resistance. Reserve yourself for the future. The moment will come when your return will be imperative. But it isn’t that moment now.”

“Will the invasion take place in autumn?” I ask.

Please say yes . Please let it happen before the end of 1943 .

Dansey’s face clouds over. “We’re not ready. Which is why we need you here. Until then,” he says and smiles benignly, “just follow this old fox’s advice.”

Old fox is about right. But I’m no rabbit waiting to be snared in his jaws.

It’s easier to be angry at Dansey than it is to imagine surviving into yet another year, a fifth year of Nazis and Gestapo and running and dying.

But his next words are “My dear,” and his tone is kind. “Eagle mustn’t go back to France.”

I want to hug him. If MI6 makes Léon stay in London, he’ll never be arrested by the Gestapo. Every field in France can grow pink heather and it won’t matter.

But Léon would kill me if he found out I didn’t fight for him.

Invisible hands reach out of my heart and grab at the words I’m about to say, trying to stuff them back inside me. But the part of me that knows I have to be able to tell Léon that I protested wins—just.

“Have you sworn to cloister us up one by one?” I ask coolly.

Dansey crosses one knee over the other, opens a packet of cigarettes, and offers one to me. I accept a little too eagerly.

“I ought not to indulge your vices,” he says, and I want to poke the cigarette in his eyes. Every man in MI6 smokes. Every man in Alliance smokes. Anyone would smoke when they’ve been trapped in a brothel for weeks with the Gestapo hunting them.

I inhale with the utmost pleasure.

But Dansey wipes my satisfaction away. “Over the last three years, I’ve seen Resistance fighters arrive and depart, never to return. Eagle is going to be arrested again. I’ve been through his file. Three arrests. Two escapes. Three two-way Lysander trips. He’s survived for too long. His time is up.”

All of a sudden, I’m back in the fortune-teller’s room in Vichy, sitting before a different man, this one telling me I would make it to the end of everything. I want to go back there, to the question I didn’t know I should ask: But will everyone else? Will Léon?

Léon is my everything, so for me to make it through, he must, too.

But if Léon is my everything, why don’t I steal away with him to a cottage and turn my back on war? If my children are my everything, why is it that all I have is the white-hot wreckage of months not spent with them?

Snow is white. Gardenia flowers and bones, the dome of the Sacré-Coeur. The lies I tell myself are not. No, my lies are a night so dark you can’t see through them to the truth that lurks, Sphinx-like, within.

So I tell one truth at last. “There’s something more than statistics. There’s premonition. I feel it, Léon’s arrest. No.” I shake my head, speak three bare, uncoded words, “I’ve seen it.”

And Dansey, this man I don’t especially like, shudders as if premonition has shown him a crystal ball depicting a bloodied future, too. Perhaps beneath the distaste of women in war and the possessive circling of Alliance, there is a man who feels a thing or two for the people taking risks for him.

“In different ways, we foresee the same thing,” he says soberly.

The relief that MI6 is on my side, that they’ll help me keep Léon alive, is so enormous that I have to restrain every muscle in my body so I don’t let Dansey see that Léon is much more to me than just my chief of staff. I grind out my cigarette, make sure Dansey understands fully the problem. “Eagle won’t agree to stay. He’s a soldier. He’s sworn to give his life for France.”

“If you order him not to return, we won’t provide him with a Lysander. I’m putting his fate in your hands.”

Oh yes, Dansey understands. And now, so do I—I am the rabbit, writhing in the jaws of a trap I’ve walked right into. The job of ordering Léon is mine.

I stand, turn my back to Dansey. God, when can I scream? When will there ever be a moment when I can howl like an animal and pick up all the papers on the table and sweep them to the ground and set fire to them all?

If I order Léon to stay in London, he’ll obey because he’s a military man and Alliance is a militarized organization and I am his commander.

But I’ll lose him. He could never love a woman who took France from him.

But if I let him return to France, my gut and Dansey’s, too, say it will be the end. He’ll still love me—but what does that matter if he’s dead?

—

My things are moved to the cottage by a team of secret service personnel. I leave them to it. I don’t care where my things go when I have Léon’s life in my hands and my choices are to pull the trigger on him or on love.

I walk through the city for hours, searching not for answers, which don’t exist, but for solace. But the facades don’t shine white in the afternoon sun like in Paris. People speak with hard consonant sounds; there are no silent letters. There are voids where there once were buildings, a sky that’s too listless to ever be set aflame by the sun.

I try to parse out the facts, leave the emotions behind. But Léon isn’t a fact. He’s the father of my child, the man who gave me a ring with our names written on it in a code only he and I understand.

I return to the cottage exhausted.

Léon is there, holding his arms open for me to walk into, his smile devastatingly charming. “Shall we go out tonight?” he asks.

“Just the two of us. No one else.”

He studies my face and I know he can see I’m struggling with something. He frowns when I say nothing. In every struggle, he’s been my lieutenant. But not this time.

So that I don’t have to speak to him, not now before I’m ready— will I ever be ready? —I bathe and slide into the blue silk Maggy Rouff dress that I wore on my last night in Paris. I put on makeup and comb my hair, and for one fleeting second in the mirror, I see her. The young girl who tore around mountain passes, who searched for adventure in the cockpit of an airplane; the one who thought adventure equaled joy.

But it is loss and agony, too.

Léon comes up behind me, slips his arms around my waist. “I’ll have to come up with a better word than magnisquise, ” he says, kissing my neck.

“Alive,” I say. “That’s the best word of all.”

He frowns again, but before he can ask, I take his hand and we go to the Ritz, heading belowground to what was once the Grill Room and is now a nightclub. We sit at one of the tables lit by a candle stuffed into the neck of a wine bottle. All around us, similar flames flicker, breaking apart the darkness. A chandelier made from more wine bottles sends a delicate halo over the dance floor so you can’t see the sandbags lining the walls or the cheap utility tablecloths. But you can see a large caricature of Hitler and Goring. I turn my back on them and talk to Léon about everything other than war. Flying. Morocco. Our families.

“They were so in love,” I tell him after I’ve described my trailblazing mother, who gave birth to my older sister in Shanghai and only returned to France for a few short months under duress to birth me. “She couldn’t bear not to be with my father.”

“I don’t know whether it’s the romanticized imaginings of a man who’s never had to raise seven children.” Léon smiles briefly. “But I think my parents were the same. They needed so little. They had so little. One tiny town. No travel to faraway places. Just fierce pride in France, in their children, and in love and honor. They didn’t ever seem to want anything else.”

He looks pensive, as if he’s trying to figure out if his memories are right or if he’s rewriting the past to suit the narrative he wants to believe in. All night we’ve been using only one hand to sip from our wineglasses, our other hands entwined, but I untangle my fingers now to stroke his beautiful cheek. “I can tell by the man you are that their pride was well-founded.”

He smiles. “I’m sure there were moments when they thought the better of it.”

I’m about to ask him to tell me about his youthful escapades when I realize: Léon didn’t have a youth. He was in the trenches at age seventeen. By age twenty, he’d been awarded his first Croix de Guerre. His life has been war, and training for war. He was made, built, lives for, this fight.

What if that’s his destiny? Not me. Not our son.

God.

Léon senses my shift in mood. He leads me onto the dance floor as the music changes to “Silver Wings in the Moonlight,” and I know I won’t get through this song—about a woman who shares her pilot lover with the moon and who prays to the moon to keep him safe—without weeping.

The moon is the thing we set our schedules by. It’s our only way to get supplies, to get to London and return to France. Everything turns on the light of the moon, something easily extinguished by just one cloud.

Léon lets me have one silent, struggling minute. Then he murmurs, “You look so beautiful tonight. But so sad.”

My inhale is sharp and loud—the sound you make before you sob. Then I do sob, all over his jacket. Léon responds by holding me close until the song is finished, then he reaches into his pocket for a handkerchief, pressing it to the waterlogged crescents beneath my eyes. “Please tell me,” he says.

“What if this is all there is?” I blurt, arm sweeping the room. “A few stolen nights? A dance or two? What if this is all there is ?” I repeat and, unbelievably, he smiles.

“Then we’d better make the most of it.”

“I’ve had enough of that!” I cry. “Of romanticizing the absences and the longing. Of being so grateful to be alive that just waking up feels like a bonus. It should be our right, Léon. It should be our damn right.”

The noise of the band makes it impossible for anyone else to hear me roar, but Léon hears, and now his eyes are turned away, glittering with pain or tears or a matching fury. While he’s not looking at me, I say, voice resolute, “Dansey wants you to stay in London. To not return to France.”

His whole body stiffens. “What did you say?”

We’re waltzing still, such a gentle dance, but each of my words is a bullet. “You’ve lost all your lives and then some. Dansey says the law of averages—”

“Damn their law of averages,” he breaks in.

And now the fight we have to have is here.

“I agree with Dansey,” I say.

Léon stands very still and waits for me to look at him.

A true leader would look her lieutenant in the eye when she tells him to do something he abhors. So I lift my eyes up very slowly.

Around us, couples swirl, taking advantage of proximity and wine and darkness to extract a little pleasure in a hopeless world. Léon and I stand, bodies apart, eyes locked together, both quivering with anger.

If I’m mad, I won’t cry.

“I’ll never stay here.” His words are violent. “I’ll never agree to fall down on my job.”

A lesser man, someone I could never love, would have breathed a sigh of relief and said, Okay. I’ll stay in London, where we can dance and worry only at a far remove about the people who believe in us.

My anger dissipates, only a truth as cruel as man remaining. “I know.”

But Léon is so furious he doesn’t hear me. “Tell them I’ve got fifty bombing missions to my credit,” he blazes. “According to their calculations, I should have been dead long ago. This ghost is going to France!”

I dig down into the villainous murk in my gut and unsheathe the largest weapon of all. My power. “You can only go if I say you can.”

There’s a beat. Then another. A drum fills one, a violin the next. Then the other instruments break in and couples move elegantly around us and the candles flicker and everything is the same as it was—but the things that matter are all different.

“You can’t do that to me.” There’s fear in his eyes now, fear of me. “I can’t let down all the airmen I’ve recruited, can’t let them be caught in place of me.”

Damn him for showing me this isn’t about personal glory. That it’s about his men. But just as he’s a leader of every pilot he’s brought into Alliance, so, too, am I his leader.

“Come outside,” I say. “I have something to tell you.”

I see his heart break right in front of me.

He sets his jaw into the face of a man who’ll do what every atom of his soul tells him he shouldn’t, if I order him. Because that’s how military structures work.

But it’s not how hearts work. Hearts never do what will hurt the least.

They always do the thing that will break them, and I’ve known this since I first met Léon in 1940.

I lead us along Piccadilly, turn in to St. James’s Square. In the middle is a statue of a man on a horse charging off into battle. It’s what men have done since the beginning of time, men like Hitler, who’s ridden over the bodies of so many dead that the soil of France may grow only the skeletons of heroes from now on.

My back turned to Léon, I speak to the waxing moon. “This is why I tried for so long not to let myself love you. I knew I’d have to choose between a decision I’d want to make because I love you, versus the one I should make for the good of the network.”

Behind me, I can feel anger rippling from Léon like the concussion of a bomb as I prepare to do the one thing I swore I never would.

I choose Léon over France.

“Alliance needs for you to stay here in London, alive, doing the job that nobody can do better than you. France needs you here.” My voice cracks and I swear, a cry as useless as a prayer. “But because I love you, I’ll let you go.”

I can’t stop the sound that follows those words, not a sob, but a wail, like a beast, like a person dying, the kind of anguish that makes you lock your doors and hide under the bed and pray you never come face-to-face with its kind. If crying is the limit of what we have as humans to express pain, then my God, how inadequate it is.

Léon is in front of me now, cupping my jaw in his hands, trying to hold still my flailing arms, his words urgent. “Minerva, if anything happens to me, know that I’ll be the one washing the sunsets for you so your world still shines. I’ll be the one giving you Moroccan blue afternoons—”

I shove him away. “Stop it! Dying isn’t romantic. When I think of Romeo and Juliet, I don’t press a hand to my heart and smile. I think, You stupid fools .”

“What about Joan of Arc?” Léon pleads, holding my face again as if he wants to make me see the world the way he does. “She saved France because she kept on fighting. Do you think she was a fool, too?”

“Yes.” My voice is savage. “Because what did it change? Five hundred years on, and men are still tearing the world apart. There is no honor. Just war and death. And I’m tired of pretending any of it is heroic.”

“It isn’t heroic,” Léon whispers. “It’s right.”

Putain! I want to shout, a word I’ve never said aloud, let alone screamed at the man I love. Instead, I pull him back to the cottage and up to my room and into my bed, and we make a warlike kind of love—the only kind you have left when you know the one you love might die tomorrow. Our lips and our limbs clash, his mouth barely landing on my skin before it moves away to claim some other territory, my hand barely touching his jaw before I find something else to hold on to, chasing that moment of being so tangled together, it’s as if we’ll never let go.

But you always have to let go.

—

Of course I dream of pink heather—unrelenting, calamitous pink heather. I dream of the plane landing, the Gestapo, the voice. I can’t even close my eyes without seeing neon pink outlines beneath my lids.

Eventually I climb out of bed and creep down the stairs and into the music room, and I remember that once upon a time I was a girl who played the piano for eight hours a day, who wanted to be a pianist, making music for the pleasure of crowds.

What a life that would have been.

Chopin’s “Revolutionary étude” pours out of me, that piece about patriotism and rage and heroes. It takes a few attempts at the opening bars before the fingers on my left hand move as neatly as they used to, and then I have it—and I let the music cry for me with every broken semiquaver.

“Minerva.”

There in the doorway is Léon summoning the goddess of war.

He walks over to me wearing a pair of pajama pants, torso muscular and strong. He drops to his knees, resting his forearms on my thighs, hands holding mine. And I say what perhaps the music has just told him. “I’m going back, too. We’ll fly back and forth to France on alternate moons so that one of us is always here doing the invasion planning and one of us is always there.”

He shakes his head furiously and I whisper, “Just as I can’t ask you to stay here, neither can you ask it of me.”

“We all think it will be me, but—” He swears, eyes glittering, angry—not at me, but at the world. “What if it’s you who’s caught? You being—” He cuts himself off and I don’t know what, specifically, he was about to say— tortured, burned, beheaded —but it doesn’t matter. It all ends the same way.

“I can’t even bear thinking about it,” he finishes, voice hoarse.

“But you ask me to bear it for you.”

“ God, ” is all he says, and now his head is in my lap, the music having unleashed something in him I didn’t mean to loosen.

When I met Edouard, I thought it was the kind of love I would sacrifice everything for. But here I am with the man I love more than any other, and we aren’t choosing each other.

We each break and are broken. We each love—but we are warriors, too.

“If it is me,” I say, my voice cracking, “will you tell Achille about me?”

Léon’s voice is fierce. “I’ll never read him myths about Greek heroes. I’ll tell him the story of his mother, because she’s the world’s only true hero.”

Then we’re on the rug on the floor, and Léon is kissing the side of my hip where the pain sometimes lives and whispering, “I love you.” He whispers it again as he kisses the inner and outer bones of my ankles, and then again as his lips find the inside of my elbow, the lobes of my ears, the tip of my pinky finger.

We say those words to each other just before the end, and then again at the end, and also after the final moment has passed and we’re lying in each other’s arms as the dawn breaks like our hearts over the sky, weeping gold.

—

In the morning I tell Dansey that Léon is going back to France, that I’ve given him strict conditions: The minute he lands, he won’t stay with the reception committee but will make his own way to Paris. He won’t roam around the country until he’s looked into the arrests. Then he’ll start the process of decentralizing the network. In October, he’ll return to London and I’ll go back to France and we’ll divide the job between us, back and forth each month until the invasion finally happens.

“You’ve made a very grave decision,” Dansey says.

I hang up the phone and weep.