Wild Lavender (58 page)

I sang those words with all my heart. The besotted SS men gaping at me must have been convinced that I was singing for them, but when I looked out at the audience I didn’t even see them. I was singing for Roger, for Odette and Petite Simone, for my family, for Monsieur Etienne and Joseph, for General de Gaulle, for Minot and Mouse and the Judge, for
André and all the Resistance. I sang for my father and I sang for France. I did not allow myself to think of the men in front of me, many of whom had tortured and executed Resistants.

Although I hated those SS men with every inch of my being, they adored me. When I finished the song, the audience rose to its feet. I bowed graciously and slipped into the wings. ‘Bravo!’ they called out. ‘Encore! Encore!’

Monsieur Dargent was standing in the wings. We exchanged a smile. The audience cheered and clapped louder.

‘Go on!’ Monsieur Dargent said. ‘You’re a performer. Give your audience what it wants.’

I rushed back out on stage and stood in front of the swastika backdrop. I sang the Africa song all over again.

The audience was still shouting for me when the fifth curtain finally came down. If I had dropped dead on the spot at that moment, I would have died the happiest woman in the world.

I
n November, the Allies attacked the Axis powers in North Africa. The operation was a success, and gave the forces a base not only to rescue France but Italy as well. When André brought us the news, Madame Goux and I hugged each other, pressing our wet, tear-streaked cheeks together and laughing with joy. In the midst of the darkness that had fallen over our lives, there was a flame of hope flickering again. Of course we weren’t aware then that the Allies would take another two years to enter France, and that life was going to get worse before it got better.

Just as Monsieur Dargent had predicted, the Germans rushed across the demarcation line and occupied the south of France to ‘defend’ us against the enemy. As morale soared throughout the Resistance, and Britain and de Gaulle stepped up their efforts to arm the
maquis
in preparation for an Allied invasion, so the repression by the Germans became more brutal. The Milice was formed: a French army at the command of the Gestapo and made up of the worst elements of society, including criminals who had exchanged prison terms for the chance to hunt down Resistants.

André and his wife had come under suspicion and, to avoid exposing the network, André had to sever his ties with it, although he still made payments through his sister, Veronique, who was living in Marseilles. Because he could no longer act as a go-between for information, I had no news from Pays de Sault. But André did have access to a radio at one of his factories, and from the BBC
we learned that the Russians were advancing, forcing the Germans back towards Berlin. With the people of their conquered countries willing to cooperate, the Nazis had hoped that their satellites could run largely on their own. Although they had been right in many ways, they had not counted on the passion of the Resistance not only in France but in Austria, Denmark, Poland, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Norway and even in Germany itself. Count Kessler would have been proud of the young German men and women who were fighting valiantly from the eye of the storm. Even if numbers were pitifully few, the underground rebels were prepared to fight to the death; proof that sometimes passion could be more significant than power.

In the last year of the war, I was woken each morning by the bone-chilling crackle of gunfire. For every German soldier killed by the Resistance in Paris, ten French prisoners, many of them Resistants themselves, were taken to the woods of the Bois de Boulogne and shot. While the Resistance members had always known that they might pay for their patriotism with their lives, the terror truly hit Paris when the Germans began running out of imprisoned Resistants and started rounding up civilians.

Each day when Madame Goux went to buy our rations, accompanied by a Gestapo agent, she read the death notices pasted on the bakery wall. That was how I learnt of the execution of Madame Baquet, the owner of the Café des Singes. She had been waiting at the Hôtel de Ville to renew business papers when the Gestapo rushed in, bent on revenge for an act of sabotage performed by the Resistance. They had emptied the local police station of prostitutes, homeless old men and drunk husbands but still did not have enough people to fulfil their numbers. So they rounded up the civilians in the foyer—a student, two housewives, a doctor, a librarian, a lawyer and Madame Baquet. The following morning the terrified huddle was marched into the dappled light of the woods. I never visited the Bois de Boulogne after hearing of the incident, but it
was said that the bullet marks were still visible on the trees for years afterwards.

In the summer of 1944, the tide could not be held back any longer. André managed to smuggle a disassembled radio transmitter past the guards outside my apartment and together we listened to the crackly voice of de Gaulle announce: ‘
This will be your year of liberation
.’ Something was happening at last.

Paris started to look like a city at war. German trucks rushed out of the city and a few days later they returned full of wounded soldiers. André and I met again to listen to the BBC but this time the signal was blocked. Food became scarce; there was no milk or meat in any of the shops. Our electricity and gas supplies were limited to certain times of the day. The
métro
stopped running. It was from Monsieur Dargent that we heard the thrilling news that the Allies had landed in Normandy and were pushing the German army back.

By August it was clear that the Germans were losing. They were no longer the proud force that had entered Paris. As most of the soldiers were evacuated, those left behind to guard strongholds moved about in groups, terrified of what might happen to them should they become separated from their unit. The women’s auxiliary organisations and civil servants were evacuated in buses. Madame Goux recounted to me the story of one busload of German women, military wives, who waved tearfully at the Parisians lined up along the sidewalk, wondering what was going on. Madame Goux’s parting shot was to suck up as much saliva as she could and project it at the bus’s windscreen. The most telling detail, however, was that the German soldier accompanying her said nothing.

In the middle of the month, there were rumours that the Allies had landed in the south and, with the help of the
maquis
, were chasing the Germans and Milice out of their strongholds. The Paris police, seizing the moment to wipe out four years of shame, put away their uniforms but kept their weapons. The numbers of the fighting Resistance
swelled. The police may have been left with the task of handing Paris over to the German army back in 1940, but now they were keen to show the enemy the way out.

Madame Goux and I clung to each other in my apartment, listening to the exchange of fire between the Germans and the Resistance. We kept a candle burning, although candles were not easy to come by, and prayed for Paris and the men and women who were dying. The French people took to the streets; not in our neighbourhood, but on the Left Bank and in the suburbs. They built barricades to stop the Germans escaping or patrolling the city in their tanks. Madame Goux and I ripped up sheets to make bandages for the Red Cross, and the German soldiers who guarded us now that the Gestapo had fled allowed us to take them to the hospital. Bound by the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross nurses were treating both Resistants
and
Germans.

Then one hot August evening, while I was taking a bath, the battle sounds ceased. The silence after so much violence was unnerving. A while later, the bells of Notre Dame began to ring. I dried myself and wrapped a kimono around me. I rushed to the window and threw the sash open. The bells of St Séverin joined in with those of Notre Dame and I peered into the black night, wondering what was happening. The lights of the buildings near the Seine lit up, flickered, then died. Suddenly the bells of St Jacques, St Eustache and St Gervais filled the night with sound.

I ran downstairs to find Madame Goux standing in the foyer, her face gaunt and her eyes wide. ‘What do the bells mean?’ she asked.

It was then I noticed that the two German soldiers who guarded us were gone. I rushed down the remaining stairs and threw my arms around her. I knew I would never forget that moment. The hug I exchanged with her hurt my ribs but lit my heart.

‘It means the Allies have won!’ I cried. ‘Paris is free!’

In the initial sweep of euphoria it seemed that our joy would last for ever. The tricolour flew from windows and doorways, some of the flags hastily sewn from whatever was available—a white tablecloth, a red petticoat, a blue shirt. Despite the glass that littered the streets and the stray bullets fired by German soldiers who had not yet received notice of their surrender, we could not stay indoors any longer. The summer air was filled with the stirring melody of the
Marseillaise
, once banned but now sung on every corner.

I walked Paris from street to street, as I had when I first arrived in the Twenties, but as I passed the cafés and the crowds gathered around monuments or the flower-strewn Allied tanks, it dawned on me that our happiness was a kind of charade. How could Paris be the same? There were bullet holes in many of the buildings and flowers laid on streets and pavements where a Resistant had offered up his or her life for France. ‘
Here died Jean Sauvaire, who fought bravely for his country
.’

But there had been pitifully few who resisted. What about those who had done nothing, or, worse, who had actively collaborated? Already I was hearing of women who had taken German lovers having their heads shaved and being paraded through the streets, and other collaborators being found dead in stairwells or floating face down in the Seine.

General de Gaulle was due to make his official appearance in Paris a few days after the Allies had entered it. We understood from the police milling around the Arc de Triomphe that he would be parading that afternoon along the Champs élysées. I was eager to see the man who had been a disembodied voice in the war years, a voice that had so inspired me that I was prepared to risk my life for its call.

As my dining room had a balcony facing the avenue, I invited André and Monsieur Dargent to join us for lunch. Madame Goux and I set about scrounging together the best feast we could—tomatoes, some limp lettuce, bread and
goat’s cheese. We pushed the table close to the balcony doors and set it with serviettes of red, white and blue. After we had put the champagne on ice, I glanced at the clock and noted with surprise that André and Monsieur Dargent were half an hour late. André, especially, was usually so precise.

‘Look at this,’ said Madame Goux, calling me out to the balcony. She unfurled a tricolour that she had somehow managed to knit in the past few days. The sight of her woolly flag, curling at the edges, made me laugh.

I was about to offer her a drink when there was a violent banging on the door which made both of us jump. I rushed into the entrance hall and called out, ‘Who is it?’ But the caller only answered by knocking fiercely again. Certainly it wouldn’t be André or Monsieur Dargent.

‘I’ll answer it,’ said Madame Goux, undoing the latch before I could stop her.

She opened the door and three armed men rushed across the threshold, one of them brandishing a machine gun as if he were expecting to find an apartment full of Germans. They were unshaven and smelt of stale sweat but there was pride in their rugged faces. I glanced at the FFI armbands on their shirtsleeves. They were men of de Gaulle’s French Forces of the Interior.

‘Come in,’ I said, assuming they must be searching for vantage points from which to detect snipers over the Champs élysées. Some people had thought it premature for de Gaulle to parade out in the open when there were still pockets of fighting in the city. But he had insisted on congratulating the people of Paris for their contribution to the liberation. ‘Please feel free to use whatever balconies or windows you wish. And help yourself to the food. We don’t have much, but you are welcome to it.’

A flicker of surprise flashed across the face of the soldier nearest to me. ‘Mademoiselle Fleurier?’ he barked.

‘Yes.’ I was taken aback by the ferocity in his voice.

‘By the order of the Paris police, I am placing you under arrest,’ he said. ‘You will come with us immediately.’

I didn’t move. I was too stupefied to take in his orders. The soldier stared me down as if I were challenging him. ‘You are charged with collaboration and will accompany us to the police station.’

I glanced at Madame Goux, whose gaping mouth showed that she was as shocked as I was. ‘You must be joking,’ she said. ‘Mademoiselle Fleurier is not a collaborator. She is a Resistant. She was resisting from the moment the Germans occupied Paris. Why else would she have been placed under house arrest?’

The soldier shrugged. ‘That is not what our report says. But if it is the truth then she can clear it up at the station.’

My head felt light. I tried to think clearly. The best course of action would be to cooperate. Surely I couldn’t be found guilty of collaboration even if I had somehow managed to be charged with it? I would have to set things right.

I picked up my purse from the sideboard and put my hand on Madame Goux’s arm. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘There has been some mistake. Go ahead and celebrate with the others when they arrive. I am sure this will be cleared up and I will be back for afternoon tea.’

The police station the men took me to looked like a railway platform. Soldiers marched up and down the foyer with guns by their sides while the police checked the papers of bleary-eyed detainees, many of whom looked as if they had been dragged out of bed. I was led to a row of chairs and made to sit down next to an old lady in a dressing gown and slippers. I glanced around the waiting area and saw that Jacques Noir was sitting opposite, his head in his hands. Surely they couldn’t mistake me for someone like him? Noir had gone so far as to perform for Hitler in Berlin. I glanced at my watch. If this whole misunderstanding was cleared up soon, I could be back in time for the parade.

After my papers were verified, I was taken to a cell. It was crowded with the most mismatched group of women I had ever seen. At least half of them were prostitutes, while
the rest looked like shopkeepers and housewives except for three elegantly dressed women who were huddled together on a bed.

‘What do you think they will do to us?’ whimpered one of the women, tugging at her red curls. ‘My God, what will they do to us?’

She seemed familiar to me and I tried to place her. Then I realised she was one of the women I had competed with in the
Concours d’élégance automobile,
a former friend of André’s. He had told me about her war deeds. She had taken a perverse pleasure in denouncing Resistants and Jews, including her own housekeeper. She didn’t do it for the reward, she never took the money. She did it because she thought it was an amusing game.

‘I hope they shoot you,’ said one of the prostitutes. ‘Just so the rest of us can get some peace.’

I hoped that they
would
shoot her for what she had done, and was surprised at the vehemence that stung my blood. I hadn’t known I was capable of such hate. I glanced at my watch: it was almost three o’clock. General de Gaulle would have started to march.