Page 46 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

45

The Freedom Bar

Aix-en-Provence, July 1944

Hours later, I’m standing on an upturned bucket on a cot in a cell in a military barracks, the air around me fetid with bedbugs and body odor. The little I’ve eaten in the last twenty-four hours sits in a disgorged pile in the corner, along with the contents of the slop bucket I’m balancing on. I’m naked besides my underwear and I’m gripping my dress in my teeth the same way a lioness carries her cub. A Gestapo commandant is on his way to interrogate me, and a hysterical bubble of laughter rises up in me at this ridiculous scene.

What am I doing? Thinking I can squeeze through the bars? Surely it’s rule number one of building a prison: Make sure the bars are close enough together that no one can fit through.

The laughter vanishes as quickly as it appeared. I want to retch again, vomit up stupid hope. I’m not a Shanghai robber with a slickly oiled body. I’m a thirty-four-year-old mother of three children whom I can’t leave motherless.

So I stretch up my arms, take hold of the top of the board covering the window, and haul myself up, feet scrabbling spider-like against the wall. When I’m high enough, I wedge the board under my armpits and throw one leg over, take a moment to catch my breath, then throw the other leg over. Now my whole body is hanging between the board and the bars, hands gripping the top like I’m a cat and it’s my ninth life. I have to let go, drop feetfirst onto what I hope will be a sill wide enough to stand on.

What if there isn’t a sill and I fall into an opening in the wall? What if it’s full of rats? What if …

Nobody in a war zone asks what if questions.

I let go.

I land with a jolt on a stone ledge, pressed between the board and the bars. There are no rats. Just the sight of freedom beyond. I want to linger in the beautiful moment of imagining that yes, the stonemason was incompetent enough not to know how far apart to space the prison bars.

But at the edges of the sky, black is softening to charcoal. I don’t have any moments left to linger in the folds of a dream.

I push my head against the space between the first two bars. There’s no way it will fit. I try the next two bars. Also impossible. Then the third set.

I gasp. My head almost fits. If I push very hard, I might be able to force it through.

I shut my mind off from imagining what might happen: my skull crushed, ears torn off. That will be a far lesser agony than what awaits me in the hands of the Gestapo.

I shove my head into the gap.

It hurts more than childbirth, more than being folded double in a mailbag for ten hours. But I keep pushing, and the sudden shock of my head popping through the bars almost unbalances me.

I stand there panting, sweat streaming off me, every part of me from my neck down still inside the cell. But my head is liberated.

I steel myself for the rest.

Then a convoy of cars draws up just opposite my window, and I silently swear every shocking word I’ve ever heard. They’ll see my head sticking out!

There are some moments when you think through what you need to do and others when you know that thinking will undo you.

I yank my head back through the bars so brutally I’m sure my ears are gone.

I stand there, limp and sobbing from the pain. The Gestapo commander has arrived. In a few minutes he’ll walk through the door and find me here, naked and pressed between the bars and the board like a butterfly pinned to a display. And he’ll pierce me with the final pin—a bullet from his gun, a bayonet from his rifle.

And Noah’s Ark will sink to its grave.

—

The act of breathing is harder than believing in God in wartime. Blackness doesn’t just hover at the edges of my vision, but right in front of me as German words punctuate the night. I realize someone in the convoy is talking to a sentry in the courtyard, who’s positioned exactly where I’d planned to run.

Merde. I hadn’t counted on there being a guard outside. Not that it’ll matter when the Gestapo pile out of their cars and into my cell.

Listen, I tell myself. Translate. Find out how much time you have.

As I unravel the meaning of their words, I almost collapse again, this time with relief. It isn’t the Gestapo. Just soldiers asking for directions.

At last the trucks move off. As they pass, I see it’s a military unit that I warned London about—going to Normandy to reinforce troops. How strange to see something I perceived yesterday as a threat but that I now vastly prefer to a Gestapo convoy.

The sentry marches away, back to his post in the courtyard.

I stare at the bars. Everything rebels at the idea of pushing my head back through. But this is the moment for true resistance. I’ve just sweated enough to fill an ocean. Perhaps it’ll be easier this time.

Before the devil in my mind can mock my ridiculous optimism, I push. If I thought that pulling my head back in through the bars was the worst pain I’d ever experienced, I grossly underestimated how much pain it was possible to feel. This is torture I don’t have a word for. My skin weeps sweat and finally my head passes through.

I stand there filling my lungs with oxygen until I’m ready to tackle my shoulders, which thankfully escape the bars easily, as does my right leg up to my thigh.

Which means it’s time for my hips.

I’m stuck half in and half out of a window. There’s no going back. So I concentrate on what must be fact—if my head could fit through, so can my hips.

I turn sideways and my God I want to scream. What kind of wreckage am I making of my already damaged hip? I bite my tongue so hard to stop myself from making a sound that my mouth pools with blood. But it’s better to hurt now in my own hands than in the hands of the Gestapo.

One second later, I’m on the outside of the window.

I jump onto the pavement below.

“ Wer ist da? ” the sentry shouts.

The beam of a flashlight opens the darkness. I have to move before he sees the woman most wanted by the Gestapo on her hands and knees in the dirt.

Does my hip still work? It has to.

On all fours, I crawl to the edge of the square. Then I stand and run into the open, almost losing my balance in the potholes I can’t see in the dark, branches ripping my skin, every muscle braced for a bullet to slam right through me.

—

I run and run for several minutes but don’t feel any bullets, can’t hear any sounds behind me. I stop to pull on my dress, then I run again, because if the sentry saw me he’ll be readying the dogs.

There’ll be no escaping the dogs.

Farther down the road, I come to a cemetery. Safety, perhaps. I could hide in one of the monuments and when the priest arrives in the morning, he might help. But—the dogs. Even if I hide in a chapel, the dogs will sniff me out.

Think, I tell myself, trying desperately to find a way through the pain and the panic when something trickles down the side of my face. Blood. Dogs will certainly smell that. I need to wash.

There’s a stream to the east of Aix-en-Provence. I’ve been running east already, so I run a little farther and then, tearing more of my skin to ribbons, scramble down a stony incline, tug off my dress, and scrub, paying special attention to the bleeding skin on my feet, arms, hips, and head.

Calmer now, my mind begins to work. Which way is Lucien’s farmhouse?

That’s when I realize it’s back past the barracks I’ve just run from.

No.

But there’s no other road. And Lucien will arrive at my apartment soon. The Gestapo will be waiting for him. I have to reach him before he walks into a trap.

I’ve done one impossible thing already. Which means it’s time for a second impossible thing—otherwise known as a miracle.

As I hurry back the way I came, dawn rushes over the sky the way it does in Provence: golden and glorious. Birdsong strikes up, a morning symphony completely at odds with my trembling body.

The barracks is just ten feet away. There’s a sentry outside.

Do I look dirty and suspicious?

Everyone’s dirty after four years of war.

I move forward.

Eight feet to go.

Five feet.

Three feet.

The sentry looks up.

—

His stare is blank, as if he’s dreaming, not really seeing me. I keep my head high. My gaze straight ahead. I’m a proud Parisienne off to market to get the best of whatever vegetables the Germans haven’t already taken.

I pass in front of him.

Then he’s behind me and I have no idea what he’s doing, can’t turn to look. I keep my cool until I reach the corner, where I gallop to the next street and hide behind a stand of hollyhocks. Maybe I’m crossing the line between madness and hope again, but the barracks seemed calm. There are no dogs baying. Perhaps nobody knows I’m gone.

Yet.

Soon the reveille will sound. I have perhaps ten minutes before the Nazis open my cell door.

I have to get to Lucien’s house.

A woman in mourning clothes, perhaps on her way to mass, is passing through the Cours Mirabeau. I approach and say very quietly, “Madame, I need to find the Vauvenargues Road.”

“I’m going that way, too,” she says. “You look as if you’re in pain. Lean on me.”

Perhaps she’s an angel.

The second I take her arm, the dogs begin to bark, ready to tear apart the woman whose scent they’re sniffing in my cell. A minute later, armored cars pour through the square. But the widow beside me walks calmly on, not commenting on the trembling she must feel in my body.

On the outskirts of town, she points. “It’s that way.”

I have nothing to give her. Nothing except words. “You’ve just done me the greatest service anyone has ever done me in my life.”

She nods as if it were nothing when, in fact, it was everything.

I hurry away, a new worry besetting me. I have to cross the bridge over the Torse. But the Germans have posted guards there and are stopping everyone, checking papers.

My luck is ebbing away.

I search for a solution. Right near the bridge is a field where a handful of peasant women are stooped over their work of gleaning, gathering up corn ears and dandelion. So I slip into the field, too, and bend my body double. I sift the detritus, pick out ears of corn. The Germans never glance our way.

I continue to glean, moving farther and farther across the field, until finally I’m able to emerge on the road at a point far past the soldiers who are hunting me.

At last I reach Lucien’s house. I push open the door and call out, “They’re looking for you!”

The minute the words are spoken, my body slides onto the floor.

—

When I rouse, Lucien is sitting on the end of the bed watching me as if he’s charged with caring for me, rather than the other way around. “The Gestapo are hunting for a naked woman”—he raises one eyebrow—“which is a story you’ll have to save for later. They even shot their own guard for losing you.”

It means they’ve finally figured out that the leader of Noah’s Ark has slipped through their fingers.

“It’s time to join the maquis,” I say. We’ve been supplying the maquis in the foothills of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire for some time, so they’ll be happy to take us.

“We have to take the weapons with us,” Lucien says, eyeing the submachine guns and other arms stacked in piles. “It’s twenty kilometers uphill.”

I inspect the damage done to my feet from running barefoot from prison. They’re shredded, covered in blisters and blood. But I find a smile, because I have to.

A woman who commands legions with grace and courage and humility and flair, Léon once told me. My legions need me. And I need this war to end next week so I can find Léon, arrest Lanky, free France, see my children. It isn’t the time to complain about sore feet.

“After last night’s adventure,” I say, “if it was just an easy downhill stroll I might die of boredom.”

Lucien laughs.

We wait until nightfall, then we set off—Lucien, the radio operator, and me—like loaded mules, one almost lame. Every time we hear the hum of an engine, we throw ourselves into bushes or ditches, lie on our faces in dirt and brambles. We walk, dive, cower, wait, stand, lift the packs. I bite my well-bitten lip and walk some more. Sometimes it’s only a few minutes between dives; occasionally we have a full half hour.

We’re only halfway there when I can no longer walk without support. Lucien props up one side of me, his radio operator the other.

“Go on ahead,” I tell them. “Otherwise we’ll all be caught. I’ll hide until tomorrow night, let my feet heal a little.”

“No.” Lucien’s tone is more stubborn than mine. “You’ve been shouldering Alliance for four years. It’s time for us to shoulder you for a few hours.”

So we go on. My reward is a Cézannesque dawn unfurling in delicate pink, silhouetting the turrets of the Vauvenargues Chateau and the regal Sainte-Victoire mountain, which beckons us on. I try to make my feet as strong as the spirits of my companions, but bodies are weaker than souls, and Alliance is peopled with the strongest of all. In the hamlet of Claps, beside ancestral stones that have stood in French soil for centuries, my feet give up and I sink to the ground.

A password whispered by Lucien brings us a mule and cart to take us the last few kilometers to the encampment, where the maquis welcome us and our weapons.

“It’s an honor to have you here, Hérisson,” their leader tells me.

“It’s an honor to be here,” I say truthfully.

The maquis are dispersed in groups throughout the forest. There’s one house near the encampment and Lucien tells me to sleep there but I say, “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to sleep inside again. If I sleep out here, I’ll be ready if anything happens. Put the radio in the house.”

I make myself a nest in a bush, a true animal now, and I wonder what other wild habits I’ll form over the coming days, weeks, months— please God, not years —it will take for the Allies to move through France.

The radio operator sets up his equipment inside and succeeds in making contact with London. I tell them I’m safe and can almost hear the relief in Crane’s reply. Of course he tells me he’s sending a Lysander to take back me to England and of course I tell him no, I’m not leaving. So he agrees to send supplies by parachute. The maquis whoop.

I spend the next few hours beside the radio, passing on the intelligence I’d meant to send the night before: what reinforcements are being made to the coastal defenses, which overnight bombing raids found their targets. And so it goes, the minutiae of resistance, be it blistered feet or coded words or tiny miracles.

In the evening, the maquis join me in my clearing around the fire. They want me to tell them the story, which has already become legend, of how I escaped from a prison with my dress in my teeth and my heart in my mouth.

“I don’t know why the gap in one set of bars was bigger than the rest,” I finish. “If it hadn’t been…”

A man stirs the fire, which is embers only, the perfect invisible warmth, and I wonder how long he must have been living out in these woods to be able to make a fire so comforting and yet so discreet. He says to me, “In my real life, I’m a mason. When we put bars into prison windows, after the officers have come in to measure the gaps, we nudge one bar just a little with our thumb. You’ll find a bar like that in most prisons built by masons with a heart. We call it the freedom bar.”

The freedom bar.

That night, as the maquis slip off to their lairs, I climb into a pile of blankets. Above, the sky is the richest black, like Léon’s hair, a magnificence you want to climb right into. Stars gild the night, a soul caught and shining in each one: Schaerrer, Vallet, Coustenoble. In the darkness between each constellation, I picture every vanished man and woman: Rivière, Bee, Magpie, Baston, Léon. And I pray that all of them find a freedom bar, too.