Page 5 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

4

A Wild Child

Paris, May–November 1940

“France will lose,” Navarre says, grim-faced, on the threshold of my apartment.

Navarre never lies. But if he’s right, then I—a woman known to have helped publish an anti-Nazi newspaper—am in real trouble.

And I’ve put my children in danger, too.

Indeed, Navarre’s next words are, “Send your children away. Your mother, too. Go to my house at Oloron-Sainte-Marie. It’s close to the Spanish border, safe. My wife is expecting you. I’ll join you when I can and we’ll find some other way to fight.”

Behind him, the Nazis’ bombs have recolored the sky. It’s dark at midday. Ash falls down like snow, as if Paris is a crematorium.

“In what kind of world does publishing the truth put me in a position where I have to send my children away?” I cry despairingly.

“A Nazi world,” Navarre says, his voice hard. He’s been in prison for two months, put there by our government for saying that one and a half million Germans would come crashing through the Ardennes. He was released just days ago when that prophecy came true.

If he can rejoin the troops that are trying to defend the country that threw him in jail, the least I can do is find a little courage.

“Be safe,” I call after him as he leaves.

“Be safe, mes enfants, ” I whisper as I pack Christian’s little brown bear that he sleeps with and Béatrice’s favorite blue dress, which I’ve mended and washed and pulled over her head a hundred times. For seven years, I’ve come home at night to this apartment and kissed my children, their embraces like arithmetic, multiplying my joys to infinity. But now…

My mother, working quietly beside me, interrupts my thoughts, saying, “If Navarre survives, join him. Do whatever you can to stop all of this. But do it carefully. He carries a target now. You might, too.”

“What power do I have against tanks? There’s nothing—”

I cut myself off as my son and daughter creep into the room.

“The girls at school say Hitler eats children,” Béatrice whimpers. Beside her, Christian’s eyes are huge.

It’s like watching their innocence peel away, leaving them unshelled and vulnerable in a scalding world.

I gather them in my arms. No, Hitler mightn’t eat children. But he’s given his doctors powers to execute anyone with physical and mental disabilities—starting with newborn babies.

“I would never let that happen,” I vow.

Béatrice’s relief is immediate and immense. She really thinks I can save children from Nazis. I’m just a liar who’s imperfect and weak and afraid, I want to tell her.

I catch my mother’s eye and I wonder—how many times did she want to say the same thing to me after my father died? How often did she have to hold on to her tears so she could soothe mine?

So into my daughter’s hair I whisper, just as I do when her hip hurts and she asks when it will feel better. Bient?t —soon—I always say. “I’ll see you very soon.”

In truth, I have no idea when it will be safe for me to see them again. Nor whether the lies I tell them then will still be small and white.

“Hug me as hard as you can,” I say and they do, pressing in as if we each want to stand inside the other’s heart.

I try not to cry when they carry their suitcases out the door, on their way to the island of Noirmoutier. The echoes of our goodbyes ring on as I wait in Paris, hoping the French will push the Nazis out of the north and my children can return home.

Soon, a strange parade marches through the city: young women wearing cropped trousers and riding bicycles laugh gaily, scarves knotted madras-fashion on their heads. Families push barrows filled with grandfather clocks, mirrors, and caged parrots, as if knowing the time, looking one’s best, and a sharp beak are all you need to fight the Germans. An old woman carrying two suitcases and leading a little white dog tells a man who offers her a place in his van that she’s happy to walk to Orléans.

Orléans is 130 kilometers to the south.

I like her optimism. I like the fact that everyone retreating south is smiling.

Navarre is wrong. France won’t lose.

But on the twelfth of June, the radio announces, “The French government has left Paris and declared it an open city. The Germans are thirty kilometers away.”

Run, the voice in my head urges and I do. I run out onto the street, and what I find there makes me stop.

Not a single car. A row of apartment buildings that nobody enters or leaves. Only abandoned dogs and concierges remain. No sounds, either—no scrape of chairs on a café terrace. No shrill from a policeman’s whistle. No laughter from a child’s mouth.

From somewhere above, a piano sounds out an A, melancholic—a one-note symphony for a city bereft of harmony.

It’s time for me to leave.

—

Running south is like funneling a tidal wave through a crevasse. Millions of people clog the roads. Horses, too. Cars, many with broken axles, line the roadside, as do the slumped forms of people who’ve fainted from heat and exhaustion. The sun is as merciless as any Nazi and people are wearing their entire wardrobes. Suitcases make a strange accounting of fatigue—there are few abandoned near Paris, but as the kilometers march on, more appear, their contents strewn like petals. People must realize at some point, with the Stukas shooting at us from above, that all they need are their lives—not madras scarves, which flutter like exhausted birds in the dirt.

My car sputters, protesting the heat and the strain of low gear. Just as I stayed in Morocco too long, hoping for…not even miracles, just regular, ordinary love, so too did I stay in Paris, believing that the Germans would be pushed back by France’s courage.

I’ve always had too much faith in mirages, something only dreamers and optimists ever see. But is it really better to turn away from beauty just so you’ll never be guillotined by the agony of disappointment? Isn’t it better to believe that if we live in a world that can cast Moroccan sunsets onto the sky, it’s possible to find hope and magnificence around every corner?

Not today. Around today’s corners are mothers writing names on their children’s smocks. Around another corner is a stricken woman screaming the name Gisèle over and over, and I realize the scribbled names are a way to make everyone believe that, should they become lost in the swarm, they’ll be found a little later on down the road.

If I hadn’t sent Béatrice and Christian away, that mother might be me.

Right now it’s impossible, even for me, to believe in sunsets.

—

I reach Navarre’s house in July. The pain in my left hip from sitting is so bad that it takes me more than five minutes to climb out of the car. I stand there holding on to the door for a long time before I trust my leg to bear my weight. I don’t bother to hide my limp—I can’t. It’ll be days before I can do anything more than shuffle.

Adrienne, Navarre’s wife, comes out of the house and flings herself on me. “Is he all right?” she sobs, and my gut twists. I thought she’d have news.

I tell her what I believe. “Navarre’s immortal. He’ll come.”

My belief is rewarded when, a fortnight later, word comes through that he was wounded and captured but escaped a German hospital and is now missing. Adrienne sobs anew. I spend the next two weeks comforting her, wondering where the hell Navarre is, and walking up and down the fields to ease my hip back into functionality. That’s where I see Navarre when he staggers in at last, having journeyed under cover of night for hundreds of kilometers. Both his flight and his injuries have cost him forty pounds.

“Thank God you’re here,” he says, embracing me for the first time ever.

Things are truly bad if even Navarre is getting sentimental.

And yes, things couldn’t be worse. Marshal Pétain is made head of the “French state,” whatever that is. He petitions Hitler for an armistice: a fancy word for giving up. Thus five and a half million French soldiers are defeated by just half a million Germans. As if that’s not enough, Pétain also agrees to pay a daily tax of four hundred million francs to the Nazis for the pleasure of having them occupy us.

We’re broke, defeated, and ignorant about what the armistice means. But on the streets, people cheer, “God save le Maréchal Pétain!”

The Great War has made cowards of us all. People would rather surrender than lose more husbands and fathers and brothers. I want to tear up the Pétain pictures, muffle their celebrations, scream at them that we’ve made a gift of ourselves to an evil man, but I remember the mother in Morocco who gave me her husband’s secrets for two years because she believed it would save her family from war.

We’re all selfish when it comes to those we love.

I walk into town to get a salve and bandages for Navarre’s wounds, and that’s where I hear people saying that Pétain, hero of the Great War, is only pretending to side with the Germans. Eventually, he’ll fight back. For now, they applaud the deal he made with Hitler, a man who stood in his parliament and said that war was the means to exterminate all Jews.

All the work Navarre and I have done over the past four years to prove the Nazis were megalomaniac monsters has been futile.

—

Back at the house, questions for Navarre press into my mouth like bile. You said we’d find some other way to fight—but what? And who are we fighting against—the French officials who gifted the country to the Nazis, or the Nazis themselves?

But I can’t accost an injured man who looks like he weighs less than me now.

I help Adrienne nurse him like I nursed my father through the ravages of cholera when I was thirteen. While he sleeps, I write furious letters to my mother. I miss Papa. How he’d hate to see France butchered like this .

I can’t send them. Noirmoutier is in the Occupied Zone—Pétain has let the Nazis carve up France, giving the Germans a large Occupied Zone in the north. The French get a much smaller zone in the south, where Pétain rules from Vichy, having persuaded parliament to give up sitting and gift him all its powers. No mail is allowed from the free zone, or zone nono, where I am, to the Occupied. My children are in the lion’s den. So is my sister, Yvonne, and my brother-in-law, Georges; they’re both still in Paris.

Forehead resting in hand, fingers smudged with inky tears, I surrender to self-pity as I imagine my mother’s reply: Your father would hate it. So, for him, and for Christian and Béatrice, you have to put France back together . I add a fantasy postscript: One day you’ll love someone like I loved your father. He’ll be an adventurer, too. And you will be his life’s one true adventure.

Reunifying France. Falling in love. They’re as unlikely as Hitler’s surrendering. But if I surrender, then France will forever be a Germanic province. My daughter will be told to aspire only to Kinder, Küche, and Kirche —children, kitchen, and church. And my son…

In 1938, we published a report about the Death’s Head brigade, composed of boys only a little older than Christian. The boys were taught how to kill, how to maim—and how to enjoy both.

So I wait for Navarre to recover with a patience that’s almost impossible for a buccaneer like me to practice.

In the evenings, I help him out to the porch. We stare at the Pyrenees, which stand like warriors against the flames of sunset, as we listen to the radio tell us that coal, fuel, and food are rationed. That Pétain has proclaimed a new motto: travail, famille, patrie . Work. Family. Fatherland. But only the men are to work. The women must make babies.

Patience expired, I snap my fingers, a castanet click announcing a tempest. “Gone.”

“What is?” Navarre’s equanimous expression is the opposite of the urgency that convinced me to work with him back in 1936. He’s been away somewhere for the past two days, and I expected him to come back with a plan. But he hasn’t.

“War isn’t only about a dictator and a demarcation line,” I cry. “It’s about forcing one set of beliefs down a culture’s throat. I’m everything Vichy France abhors. Do you think they’ll shoot me or stone me when they find out I’m estranged from my husband? That I left my children with my mother? Meanwhile, Charles de Gaulle is the only Frenchman who’s declared he’ll fight Hitler. He’s in London, but we’re sitting here like old women!”

You wear your emotions like a bright red dress, my husband once told me. Too obviously, and like something most men will want to remove.

I still haven’t learned to cloak them.

But Navarre doesn’t retaliate. He says something ridiculous. “We’re going to Vichy.”

“That isn’t funny.” Obviously we’re not going to the town where Pétain’s set himself up, along with the impotent government of the new Vichy French state.

“I visited Pétain yesterday,” Navarre continues. “Told him how sorry I was for my treasons. He received me as one receives a son. He gave me a job.”

My God. I haven’t seen Christian and Béatrice since May. And the man I thought I was on a crusade with has turned out to be a collaborator, too.

I whirl around, thankful only that my hip is better and I can stride rather than hobble to fetch my keys.

“I’m an official of the new Légion francaise des combattants,” Navarre calls. “I’m to turn a hotel in Vichy into a reception center to rehabilitate returned soldiers to civilian life.” A beat. “It’s the perfect cover.”

I halt. “You have about five seconds to explain what you mean.”

“I mean,” he says, the crusader’s gleam back in his eye, “that the only way to overthrow a government is to find out their secrets. We’re going to create an intelligence network to dig up every last one. Then we’ll give those secrets to the Allies, who’ll use them to help us take back France.”

“So which is it? Are you rehabilitating soldiers or starting an intelligence network?” Despite my skepticism, I sit down.

“Every ex-soldier who comes to the reception center is a potential source of secrets. We recruit the like-minded ones, eavesdrop on the rest. Which means”—he points at me—“you need to get into the habit of deceiving people.”

Haven’t I been doing that for the past seven years? I step into a salon with my blond hair and blue eyes and reputation as an estranged wife, and people think they’re getting a racy flirt they can play with like a hand of baccarat.

Then Navarre leans forward and says the most preposterous thing yet. “I have to make Pétain believe I’m trustworthy. So you’ll be the one recruiting the agents.”

The warrior mountains are hidden now by night, but I need more than nightfall to hide my incredulity. “Recruit military men? I know what they’re like—I married one. They’ll either laugh or spit on me if I try to recruit them for anything other than a date.”

“Then wear a raincoat and laugh right back.”

“That’s so easy for you to say!” I jump to my feet, cross to the balustrade, brace my hands against it. “You’re one of the most well-known military intelligence officers in the country. Nobody’s ever spat on you.”

“Spoken by a woman who’s never seen a battlefield.”

It all comes down to this, doesn’t it? The knowledge I can never lay claim to because of my gender. But— I have seen one, I almost retort. My heart bears the scars of the most personal battlefield of all: marriage.

But wrapped around Navarre’s neck is a twisted scar from the German bullet that almost killed him last month. My skin is porcelain smooth.

I close my eyes, confronted by a picture from a long time ago.

A wild child, the Shanghai mothers called me—the ones who wore white lawn day dresses and who always knew where their hats were. If anyone said it within my father’s earshot, he’d take out the dictionary, turn to the w section.

“ Wild : a free or natural state of existence, ” he’d read. “ Passionately eager .”

I’d lean in closer so I could make sure he wasn’t inventing these descriptions that were all the things I wanted to be—all the things I was.

“ Deviating from the intended or expected course, ” he’d go on. “ Having no basis in known fact. ”

I took it as a compliment and a motto—I’d live a life that outran expectations, like a ship blown into a new ocean not needing the stars to find its way. There was no way to find except the one I chose.

And now it’s time to choose. For me. For my children. For my country. We deserve more than to be condemned to travail, famille, patrie —and Nazis .

“Being a woman is the best qualification of all,” Navarre says. “Who’d ever suspect—”

I open my eyes. “A woman.”

Once upon a time I didn’t know how to fly a plane or play an étude . But anything can be learned if you want it enough.

I’m thirty years old and the mother of a ten-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl who I hope will have futures of airplanes and music and freedom and awe.

“Then I’d better get a raincoat,” I say. “Or learn to spit.”

—

I see my first Nazi on Rue du Parc in Vichy. He’s on a white horse, surveying the town from on high, uniform sleek and gray—an elegant rat. Some passersby stare, others nod deferentially; two young women smile.

Around us, women in pastel dresses shop and lunch at the H?tel du Parc as if they’re subjects in a Belle-Epoque painting. Their husbands either are part of the new ministry of Nazi collaborators or are here trying to gain the favor of those collaborators. Do these women really have no idea that the government ran away while French children were strafed by the Luftwaffe?

Their ignorance and their husbands’ groveling makes doubt flare. What if everyone believes Pétain has our best interests at heart—that he even has a heart? What if they think only inconsequential things have changed: menus written in German, the Nazis having first choice of the couturiers’ silks?

Finding people who want to help us dig up the Nazis’ secrets might be harder than I’d thought.

Sensing my dismay, Navarre indicates the Nazi. “Uniforms dirty easily.”

“So do white horses,” I reply.

We open a reception center for the Légion francaise des combattants at the H?tel des Sports. De-mobbed French soldiers come in ready to eat, to talk, to receive financial and career advice and medical care. My job is to ensure the supply of fresh flowers, hot food, and warm fires—the atmosphere men expect but never wonder how it happens.

“Be invisible,” Navarre tells me. “Eavesdrop. Take anyone worth talking to up to the first floor.”

I’d like to believe I could be invisible. But it takes only a day to know that’s impossible.

“ La ma?tresse, ” I hear one ex-military officer say.

He could be referring to my role as mistress of this establishment, but his tone tells me otherwise. These men, all at least fifteen years older than me, can’t think of a single reason why I’d be here other than as Navarre’s mistress. France is ruled by Hitler, but all they want to talk about is who’s sleeping with whom. Their eyes travel like advancing armies over my body—a simpler kind of covetousness than Hitler’s, but it comes from the same impulse: to be the one with the most power. Being a woman means either accepting weakness or learning that anything can be repurposed as a weapon.

I pick up a lukewarm coffee pot, trip on a flat piece of carpet, and spill the coffee over his lap. Chaos ensues. So much for being invisible.

“We’re not going to defeat Hitler with espresso,” I say to Navarre at the end of our first month, when the quantity of coffee I’ve served to self-important officers is significantly greater than the quantity of information I’ve gathered.

I pour us both a brandy. A double.

“The Germans are building sentry boxes along the demarcation line and manning them with armed soldiers.” My voice is flat, the brandy too delicious. “I heard you’ll need an Ausweis to cross into the Occupied Zone—and that getting an Ausweis will be about as easy as climbing the Eiffel Tower without a rope.”

“Did they reach Mougins?” Navarre asks, redirecting the conversation.

I nod. He’s referring to my mother and children, who’ve arrived safely at our Riviera summer home in Mougins in the zone nono. The Nazis allowed refugees, excepting Jews and foreigners, to cross the demarcation line for a short period to return home. I can breathe again.

Navarre swallows his brandy. “I heard from a friend yesterday that our Renault workshops are now making German tanks.”

“And I heard that the ports in Bordeaux are being modified to house U-boats. U-boats in France.” My brandy vanishes, too.

“The Allies need to know that.”

We’re slumped in the comfy leather chairs of the empty reception room, firelight illuminating our despair rather than making the night feel cozy, the hothouse roses sagging in their vases in mimicry of our posture. Our plan in coming to Vichy is to gather enough information to impress either the British or De Gaulle. We need support to build a proper intelligence network, and they have money, supplies, and arms.

I shiver. What would we do with bullets and arms?

With my arms, I want to hold my children.

Which means believing that the woman who gathered information to show her husband the Moroccan people wouldn’t just accept the Berber Decree can do this, too.

“All right,” I say, trying to convince myself as much as anyone. “We have three pieces of information. U-boats, Renault workshops, and demarcation line fortifications. So we have more than we did yesterday.”

Navarre picks up the brandy bottle and tips another finger into our glasses, voice emphatic—the military leader returned. “Here’s to making sure that each day we know a little more than the day before.”

—

I go for a walk in the evening blackout, trying to find inspiration for tomorrow. But everything in Vichy is strict, regimented—the trees spaced at precise intervals along the main street, the soldierly lampposts. There’s no hot, red sand. No bazaars or souks. No music.

One awning, different from all the rest, catches my eye. It’s adorned with yellow stars just bright enough to be visible in the dark.

Raoul Théret, Astrologue .

I’ve believed in stars since the night my father took me outside and held me up in his arms and told me the stories of the constellations hanging above Mount Moganshan in China. The story of Callisto, or Ursa Major, the she-bear forever hung in the sky beside her son, just as I would like to be forever alongside my children. Perhaps that’s why I enter—the sense that I’m failing at everything. I’m not with my children, nor am I doing any good here in Vichy.

Monsieur Théret indicates that I should sit on the banquette, where I blurt out, “I want to know about France’s future.”

“ L’Autrichien mourra de manière violente, ” he says without hesitation.

The Austrian will die a violent death .

Hitler. It has to be.

I’m about to ask, When? but the astrologer says, “You cannot change what’s written in the stars. But you can use your cunning to arrive at your destiny.”

“My destiny?”

“Vous irez jusqu’au bout de votre route.”

You will go to the end of your road .

“What road?” I whisper.

“Madame,” the astrologer says solemnly. “You will make it to the end of everything.”

The room is black-draped, like night. Celestial charts paper the walls, bringing the moon and stars inside. For a moment, I feel as if I’m hanging in the sky, a brilliant tear in the darkness, able now to see.

I press myself up with such fervor I surprise even the future-seer. “Thank you.”

Cunning means being inventive. I don’t have to speak to the men Navarre wants me to talk to. I’m good at weaving a story that enthralls people—that’s where my experience lies.

Tomorrow I’ll find a group I have something in common with. I’ll put down the coffee pot and be an enchantress instead.

Only as I’m about to fall asleep do I remember the astrologer’s other prediction: You will make it to the end of everything . What exactly is written in the stars that glitter above me, like the dust left by once sparkling lives?