Page 55 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

54

We Were Just Paper Airplanes

Germany, May 1945

The end of war is finally declared on May 8. Magpie accompanies me into Germany to find our men and our women. We take guns and safe conducts—but do we take hope? I don’t know, know only that I carry the weight of my son’s lips on my cheeks as he farewelled me that morning, waving his stuffed lion and saying, Lelelelelelele .

I want that sound to be the birdsong that summons his father to our nest.

But there is no birdsong once we cross the Rhine. There is only rubble and ruin. So many corpses that the odor permeates the air and we breathe in souls.

Magpie holds my hand, giving me the better part of whatever strength he has left and, God help me, I take it. Because we’re not visiting prisons; we’re traversing the underworld.

In Kehl, we find the bodies of Urus and eight other men from the Nantes region. Executed in pairs and thrown in the Rhine.

Rastatt: twelve of Colonel Kauffmann’s men shot. Their bodies drowned in the river.

Pforzheim: twenty-six agents, including dear Dayné, my bodyguard, shot in the back of the neck and submerged in a pit filled with water. Eight of them were women, the youngest just seventeen.

Gaggenau: nine men, including seven from Bordeaux who’d given the British so much intelligence about the U-boats.

Ludwigsburg: sixteen agents, including the Abbé Lair, who sheltered us in his church. A minister takes us to their graves and tells us they each cried out à bient?t au ciel when they were tied to their death posts.

Until we meet again in heaven.

Here, where I most need to, I do not believe in heaven.

General Baston’s name is on the prison register. But his body is not accounted for. “Try Ebrach,” the minister tells us.

There we discover that the general who called me My dear, who took risks long after his age had excused him from serving his country—a defenseless seventy-five-year-old man—was made to stand naked in the snow for hours until at last he died, too.

Heilbronn Barracks: shot on the rifle range as if they were sporting targets, twenty-five agents, including Mahout. Elephant. Rivière. Bumpkin, who thought Lanky was his friend and died for it.

Camp Schirmeck: more than one hundred Alliance agents kept in conditions no living thing should ever have to know, let alone endure. Fifteen of them were women. Once the Nazis understood the Allies were marching through France, they took some of them to Struthof concentration camp and shot them there, including Bee, who gave me her house in Le Lavandou, the place where I fell in love. Others they took to the Black Forest, where Obersturmführer Gehrum presided over a semaine sanglante, murdering Colonel Kauffmann. Mandrill. Stosskopf.

This, I understand at last, is war. The rest was just skirmishes.

All along, the Nazis and I were fighting for the same thing: France. I used to believe we didn’t fight the same way; that my way was honorable. But I no longer believe that when, in one of the prisons, I see the names of so many of my agents scratched into the walls alongside the words, Long live the Alliance . They are all dead now.

Alliance is dead, too. It dies in the place where I’m standing when I find the remnants of Lucien’s backpack in a scorched field. Tucked inside are the burned threads of the robe I bought for him in London, back when he told me he wanted to matter to someone, just a little.

He mattered. Dear God, he mattered.

But I sent him to his death all the same.

—

In Schwabisch Hall, I’m shown the suitcases that belonged to my agents. Inside are blood-stained clothes. Wrinkled wallets. Photographs of wives and children. Tokens of love and remembrance in a world where there is no love and too little remembrance.

Then Léon’s cell.

The chains are still there, lashed to the foot of the iron bed, chains that bound the man I married with a ring and a promise one beautiful Paris night when I lied to myself that we were such a stronghold of hope, nothing could tear us down. We were just paper airplanes tossed into the world by an indifferent hand, always meant to plunge headlong to the ground.

The Americans tell us we can’t go to Sonnenberg Fortress, where Léon was last known to have been held, in the cell next to Magpie’s. The British forbid us, too. It’s in the Russian zone, and the only way we’ll get in there, where the Russians now rule, is with a bullet in our backs.

My mind has fled so close to the edge of reason that I’m almost tempted to try.

An officer tells me, “There’s a warder here who was at Sonnenberg. He might know something.”

The warder, when he enters, bows.

“I know of you,” he says. He tells me that he and a few other guards, after being told to kill everyone at Sonnenberg before the Red Army arrived, helped some prisoners escape.

“About five hundred got away. The SS executioners murdered the rest,” he continues, enunciating the words as if they hurt his mouth to say. “Eight hundred men lined up. Shot. And then…”

He starts to pray, as if that might help.

Prayers are for those with faith. My faith is gone. Where did I leave it? In Marseille, when I learned that our first man, Schaerrer, had been killed? In London, when I heard that Léon had been captured? In Paris, in Toulouse, in the Dordogne, in Verdun? So many places all over France and now Germany where I’ve learned of things too terrible to understand.

“Their bodies were burned with flamethrowers,” he finishes.

Which means there will be nothing left to bury.

And the truth seeps in, like a raindrop in a desert cracking the earth open as it lands.

Leadership means becoming a less moral person, not a better one. To wrest freedom from the hands of murderers, you must sacrifice those you love.

In the end, it seems that I, too, chose France over everyone I loved.

How can anybody call that honor?

But I’ll have to pretend to the survivors, to Magpie sitting at my side, that I still believe it was honorable, because otherwise how will they go on? I will live, unable to mourn, because, apparently—we won.

“Perhaps Commandant Faye escaped to Russia,” Magpie says as if he’s now the idealist, not the pragmatist.

I let him have his hope. But I look across at the warder, who gives the smallest shake of his head.

And I know—by insisting on returning to France on September 15, 1943, Commandant Faye, my Eagle, my love, died in my stead.

That is my masterwork, a violent opus played on keys of bone.