Charlotte Gray (60 page)

He said nothing, and Charlotte guessed he would prefer her to take the initiative.

"I have a friend. I need to get a message to him. Can you help me?" The gendarme wordlessly inclined his head.

"His name is Auguste Levade. He's French. He's been here only a few days. And I need to hear a message back. I need to know he's understood." The gendarme nodded again.

"How much?" said Charlotte.

The man took a piece of paper from his pocket on which he had already scribbled a figure.

It was slightly less than Charlotte had expected: presumably most people who required this service were refugees, or French whose businesses had been closed down by the Government.

She handed him the note she had written to Levade.

The gendarme spoke for the first time.

"I can't take that." His voice was unexpectedly high and nervy.

"Just tell me."

"It's complicated," said Charlotte.

The gendarme shrugged.

"All right, let me try. My name's Dominique. Can you remember that?"

"Yes."

"Tell him ... Julien was acting, to save two children. Say " at the Domaine" as well.

"At the Domaine Julien was acting to save two children." From Dominique. Can you remember? Say it to me."

Like an overweight schoolboy, he repeated the words.

Charlotte produced the banknotes from her pocket.

"And I'll see you back here tomorrow night?"

The gendarme nodded once more as he left the room, and Charlotte felt the rising of elation. She was almost there.

In the morning, the young Rumanian and his friend carried Levade down to the infirmary, a series of five rooms in the north-west corner of the rectangle with seventy-five sheet less beds.

Some of the patients had been ill on their arrival at Drancy. There were old men who had been transferred from Jewish hospices in Paris, and lifetime inhabitants of psychiatric wards removed from their hospitals by gendarmes to make up the numbers demanded by the deportation programme. There were also those who had grown sick since arriving at the camp, women giving birth to babies conceived at liberty and many young children whose soft skin was covered with scabs and sores caused by malnutrition and the bites of vermin.

From the lips of these children there rose a permanent, bewildered wailing against which the other inmates tried to stop their ears.

Levade was given a bed with two others stacked on top of it. A Jewish nurse brought him a glass of water, but his hand was trembling too much to hold it. His whole body had begun to shiver. He tried to calm the quivering muscles of his arms and legs, but even his neck and head were shaking with the spasms of cold.

The nurse brought him the only spare blanket she could find, but his rage for warmth could not have been satisfied by all the coverings of his life-time piled on top of him.

"Cold ... cold," he muttered to the nurse, the words broken up by the rattling of his teeth.

She took him in her arms and tried to warm him, but she could not contain the jerking movements of his body. A young Jewish doctor came and cast an eye on the violently trembling figure. He wiped some blood from Levade where his teeth had pierced his lip, then passed on to other patients.

After an hour or so, the temperature of Levade's body began to rise. The shivering died down and for a moment his body was relaxed. He looked about him and saw the bare cement walls, the Red Cross nurses and their co-opted Jewish sisters, the frightened gaze of the powerless Jewish doctors. A crisis, he remembered the other doctor, Levi, saying: a crisis through which you may or may not pass ...

By this time he was starting to sweat, so he pushed back the blanket. Soon, the skin of his face was flushed purple with heat and he had to keep licking his lips. Everything seemed to be moving very quickly; his thoughts started to become disarrayed: it was like being carried on some machine of colossal momentum over 'which he had no control.

He tried with his conscious mind to calm his thoughts, but he had no sense of time any more; it had collapsed on him.

A gendarme was leaning over his bed and speaking. For a moment Levade reestablished contact with the world. The man was giving him a message. Julien ... two children ... But what did it matter?

Julien, the dear boy, his only son, how much he loved him ... How dearly, dearly ...

But the gendarme was not there. When had be been? An hour ago? A day? Had he been yet? Has he come?

"A priest... I want a priest."

A passing nurse looked at him in surprise.

"A rabbi, don't you mean?"

A minute later, or perhaps two hours, a doctor came to his bed.

"Those on the Reserve list have to go to the other corner of the courtyard. Block One. Staircase Two. We need your bed."

The man helped Levade to the door, then turned back into the infirmary. Outside, Levade leaned against the side of the building, beneath the shallow roof. It was dark.

He knelt down on the ground, then laid his cheek against the cold stone. Some stirring of childhood memory came to him at the touch of it; some recollection of the crawling world of the infant who is intimate with floors and surfaces.

He closed his eyes to spare his mind the images of the night and felt time rushing up suddenly in him. Once more he was at a thin altitude of years; but as the final wave built up, it was not with the memory of war, not with thoughts of women he had loved, not with the touch of the God he had worshipped or the pained awareness of the nights when dreams had fled from him.

It came in sounds of elsewhere, of other people's lives. He heard a baby cry, he heard the sound of a bird; there was a motor lorry backfiring in the quiet street and then a woman's voice; he heard a jangling bell.

Then all the years rose up and swallowed him in one rapid, sweet unravelling. f-v-^

"This is Gianluca Soracci. Peter Gregory." Nancy made the introduction and the two men shook hands.

"I'm sorry it take me so long," said Soracci in English.

"Is difficult. I have much work to do."

"That's all right," said Gregory.

"I understand."

"What's the plan, Gianluca?" said Nancy.

"First I have a cigarette." Soracci took an onyx lighter from Nancy's table and lit up shakily. After a deep inhalation he sat down and smiled. He was a delicate man, with small hands and feet, brown, candid eyes and a slight plumpness round the belt.

"Are you taking him in the felucca?" said Nancy.

"No, no, we do different. I take him to Italy. We go to Genoa. Then he take a ship to North Africa. Is easy."

"Any particular part of North Africa?" said Gregory.

"We see. I think soon you go where you like. Anywhere is yours. The Germans soon finished."

"Rommel?"

"Si'." Soracci nodded quickly and pulled a shred of tobacco from his lower up;

"Isn't it going to be dangerous for an Englishman in Italy, getting over the border and so on?"

"No. I fix it. I know many people. Soon all Italy is on your side. You see."

"I think he's right," said Nancy.

"There's no enthusiasm for the Germans. Especially now they're losing."

"What kind of boat?" said Gregory.

"A big boat. Goes quick." Soracci laughed.

"Then you see your old friends. The boys in blue. They take you home."

"That sounds good."

"You can trust Gianluca," said Nancy.

"He knows what he's doing."

"All right," said Gregory.

"When do we leave?"

"We leave tomorrow. I come for you in the morning. I don't know how long you wait in Genoa, but not long I think. Is the best way."

They shook hands, and Soracci disappeared.

There was a silence after he had gone. Nancy coughed and began to speak in an artificial way, as though talking to a schoolboy.

"The Italians have been useful in France," she said. They've stopped Vichy sending all the Jews from east of the Rhone up for deportation." She began to tidy the living room in a distracted way. As she was making a pile of some newspapers, she turned to Gregory and said abruptly, "Now why don't you go and pack your case?"

"I don't have a case. Nancy."

"I'll lend you one."

"When' give it back?"

"When I come and see you in London. After the war."

"Do you promise you'll come?"

"What are war-time promises?"

"It would mean a lot to me."

"Go and pack," said Nancy softly.

"Just go and pack."

All day Charlotte fretted about her gendarme and whether he would be able to repeat her message to Levade. With nothing to do to pass the time, she walked round the perimeter of the camp. A narrow road ran along the eastern flank of the building, where there was a further line of barbed wire. In the north-eastern corner there was a small entry into the camp, not large enough for a vehicle, guarded by a gendarme. The windows in the long eastern side were painted over blue, and the inhabitants behind them were invisible.

For all that she tried to imagine the hardships inside, the place and the surrounding area retained an extraordinarily normal atmosphere.

This suburb was not a wealthy one, but people came and went along the street with shopping bags; bicycles rang their bells and dogs barked as they sniffed along the pavement. Life went on, and no one seemed concerned.

In the afternoon. Charlotte went back to her room and looked through the binoculars. Between roll calls, the courtyard was almost deserted. Sometimes she could see inmates slinking round against the inner wall, presumably on their way to work in the kitchens or the repair shops. It was dark when the evening roll call began, and she could not make out the faces of the multitude who grudgingly assembled in the cold air. She went downstairs to find something to eat. While she was sitting at a table by the door, her gendarme came in.

There were about a dozen other people in the cafe: some workers on their way home, and four or five people staying upstairs, hoping for news of their families. Charlotte said nothing to the gendarme, but allowed him time to have a drink at the bar. He caught her eye as he looked round the room and she walked slowly past him, up the stairs, and waited on the landing. The sound of his boots was not long in coming, and he gestured with his head down the corridor towards the little sitting room.

Charlotte went softly after him and closed the door behind her.

"Did you find him?"

The gendarme nodded.

"He's dead."

"When?"

"This evening."

"Did you give him the message?"

"Yes."

"Was he all right when you told him? Did he understand?" The gendarme had taken off his cap and was moving it slowly round in his hands. He licked his lips and swallowed, "Yes. He understood."

"And did he have a message for me?"

The gendarme looked down at his boots. There was a soft silence in the room. Then he nodded violently, twice.

"He said, "Thank you."

"I see." Charlotte breathed in.

"And thank you. Monsieur. Thank you for ' But the gendarme brushed past her in his hurry to be gone. Charlotte heard him thundering down the stairs. She sat down suddenly on the edge of an armchair.

Andre Duguay could not see out of the windows of the bus as it drew into the courtyard; it was packed with children and their suitcases and bundles of belongings. He was jolted back and forth between Jacob and a girl of about the same age, whom the motion of the bus had made vomit on the floor.

When the doors were finally opened, the smaller ones were helped down off the platform by gendarmes. Andre stood blinking in the large cindered courtyard of Drancy, Jacob's hand clenched in his.

Some women were hovering at the edge of the group of children, and Andre instinctively went towards one of them. She did not look like his mother: she was fatter, and she spoke with a strange accent.

"My God, the smell. Where have you come from?"

Andre shrugged. In the jostling of people he heard the question repeated and the word "Compiegne." Was that where he and Jacob had been? It had been a filthy place.

Holding Jacob, he went with a group of children, following two women down the courtyard. They were in a room where they were made to take their clothes off. Andre had been able to keep himself clean, but Jacob's shorts were caked with excrement. The women held their hands across their faces as they tried to clean the children in the showers.

Some of them were covered with sores where the acid of their waste had eaten into their skin. Other women tried to wash the clothes, while the children were pushed into another room where two or three soaking cloths were used as towels. One woman who was drying them wept at their pitiful state, but another one looked at her sternly.

"Don't worry," she said, patting Andre's bare chest, 'you're going to find your parents again."

A doctor, who painted purple liquid on their sores before their damp clothes were returned to them, looked at her with a quizzical stare.

She shrugged and pouted, as though to say, What else can I tell them? Andre was in another building. A gendarme was asking his name. He wrote it on a wooden tag and hung it round Andre's neck. Some of the children did not know what they were called. The girl behind Andre, a child of about three, stared up, uncomprehending, into the big face of the gendarme. Some of the children swapped name tags.

Out in the courtyard again, Andre stood unsure of what to do. He saw some other children following a grown-up man with a white band round his arm, and assumed he might be someone in authority. He pulled Jacob along with him. They entered a staircase, but the steps were too high for some of the smaller children, who were carried by their brothers and sisters, panting and heaving to the floor above. Here, on the bare concrete landing, another man told them to keep climbing. Dragging themselves and their squaw ling burdens, they came to the third floor where they were shown into an empty room.