Page 56 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

55

I Will Ride with Him Again

Paris, November 30, 1945

In la Basilique du Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre, I listen to the prayers offered up in La Messe Solennelle for the soldiers of Alliance who fell. My right hand rests in my left, fingers bare of rings. There is only one I want to wear, and it’s been seared into the soil in far-east Germany.

Instead I hold the program for the service, which lists the names of every Alliance agent who died for France or who disappeared. Four hundred and six names are printed here. We’re still looking for around one hundred more.

The first name is le commandant d’aviation Léon Faye, disparu . Disappeared. Without a body, they say, nothing else can be declared with certainty. They don’t care that my world has lost an entire dimension, and that is proof enough to me that he is dead. There is no sepia love, just light brown. The sky is a ceiling rather than a miracle.

I can’t look at tall men.

In the pews near me are the faithful and the faithless. I don’t know which camp I stand in. Perhaps both. Just like I’m both stronger now and weaker. Conquered but victorious.

I escape before the ceremony is finished, stand on the forecourt and look out over Paris, just one of the cities we rescued. Does she know? Does she care?

Pinned above her is the blinding sun, where Léon now resides, trying to make us all sleep, wake, and turn with honor. But I can’t sleep, and my heart orbits just the three souls of my children when I’d thought it could encompass the world.

I grasp the balustrade and see the first telltale redness of chilblains. I thought they’d end when the war did. But war never ends, not for those who do not die. I’ll have chilblains each year for the rest of my life. Somewhere to focus the pain.

Suddenly the horizon unzips. From that far-distant line comes a flutter, then feathers. A bird. No, not just a bird. A bird of prey, like an eagle. It hovers above me, wings outstretched. I hold my breath. For a long time it doesn’t move, just hangs there, suspended.

I reach out my hand. Stay!

It blinks one mischievous eye. Then the eagle dips its wings in salute, wheels around, and soars upward—a soul free of pain, riding forever on the wind in his beloved sky.

One day I will ride with him again.

Because Léon Faye and I were made for the purpose of meeting. It was our destiny, but I am left with its carcass.

A burst of sound. The doors of the church open and people spill out. Alliance agents and their families. There are so many. Everyone, every man and woman, is smiling. Unshackled. Alive. Free.

There’s Jeannie Rousseau or Amniarix, the woman I’d wanted to meet and thank. I did that three months ago, when she returned against all odds from Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. There’s my mother and sister. Maurice and Marguerite and their children and mine, all hand in hand.

There’s Magpie, beckoning me over. The look on his face is half thrilled, half afraid. What does my practical Magpie, who survived sixteen months in prison, have to be afraid of?

It’s only when I reach him that I remember his name is Ferdinand Rodriguez. He’s a man, not a bird.

We aren’t animals anymore.

He stands to attention, in deference to the military uniform I’m wearing, and I’m about to tell him we’re well past formalities when he takes not just my breath, but all of my words away by saying, “May I ask you for Monique’s hand in marriage?”

Oh!

“Monique!” I call, and at last I’m on the verge of smiling.

She bounds over.

“Magpie has a question for you,” I tell her.

She shrieks, “Yes!” and Magpie picks her up and twirls her around, and their happiness is so obvious that the world turns, just a little, showing me another perspective to lay beside all the others I carry in my head. A vista—no, a realization—that is sad and beautiful, wretched and wonderful, like the tiny scars left behind by a dead lover’s kiss: That seconds might die, minutes and hours and years, too, but the consequences of our actions remain, not written down, not carved onto a stone tablet, but in the air around us. In the simple ability to step outside, tip back our heads, look up at the sky and breathein.

The world is once again vast and illimitable. Because of Alliance.

Because of us.

That’s the story I’ll tell Achille when he asks about his father.

As my children take my hands, I remember words foretold to me not that long ago, but in another time entirely: You will make it to the end of everything . It had sounded like something almost impossible.

It was.

But at the same time it wasn’t.

All I did was all I know how to do. I threw myself at life and I loved recklessly, and, my God, I was loved the same in return. Now I am once again limbless and bloodied and split wide open, and yet I will continue to love the way I always have, because it was worth it.

It was so worth it, Léon .

So nobody can say that any of it was wrong.

But please forgive me if sometimes late at night, when the children are asleep, I weep all the same.