The Race for Paris Page 21

  Fletcher awoke to the dull light of dawn, and peered through slit eyes to see Liv already loading her things into the jeep.

  “Liv,” he said softly.

  Her back was to him, her dark hair just-awake messy. He sat up slowly, repeating, “Liv?”

  “We’re almost out of gas,” she said. “Do we have anything we can trade for gas?”

  “Liv,” he whispered.

  She pulled a map from the jeep, unfolded it, refolded it to expose the area northeast of Paris.

  He stood, pulled on his trousers, and came up behind her. “Liv,” he said. “I—”

  “We’re almost to Compiègne,” she said. “Charles and I drank a bottle of wine from Compiègne the first night of our honeymoon.”

  He shoved his hands into his pockets, then pulled them out, ran them through his hair. Reached for his undershirt and pulled it on, inhaling the smell of it, the smell of her. Wine from Compiègne? There was no bloody such thing. Or if there was, there shouldn’t be.

  “Petrol,” he said, grabbing onto the buoy of the practical need. “This damn war would be over but for the shortage of bloody damn petrol.” He buttoned his shirt, the blasted tiny buttons. “How many rations have we left?” he asked irritably. “We can trade rations. We can trade our damned fags.”

  She turned with a guarded, defiant look. I’m a photojournalist, she’d said that first time they’d met. I don’t fetch tea. But if you’re bringing yourself a cup, I take mine with just a drop of milk.

  Yes, he wanted to say now. Yes, it was Charles who started the rumor that you were pregnant, Liv. The rumor Fletcher had heard was that Charles had received a letter from Liv herself—from England or from Normandy, the accounts varied—that she was pregnant. Who could have started that rumor but Charles himself? Why would the MP have asked only for Liv’s identification unless Charles had something to do with tracking her down to be sent home? But if Fletcher told Liv that, she would hate him for having told her.

  He closed his eyes and tried to picture Elizabeth Houck-Smythe. He pictured her in his brother’s arms, dancing.

  OUTSIDE COMPIÈGNE, FRANCE

  MONDAY, AUGUST 28, 1944

  It is not a woman’s place. There’s no question about it. There’s only one other species on earth for whom a war zone is no place, and that’s men.

  —Photojournalist Dickey Chapelle

  It seemed I waited forever that morning, imprisoned in the tent to save Liv and Fletcher an awkwardness I didn’t really want to spare them, or to spare myself something I didn’t understand. Maybe it was my own fault, for not having listened to Liv, or not having responded.

  I heard quiet movement, finally, and Fletcher speaking in a low voice, words I couldn’t make out. I peeked through the tent flap to see Liv bent over the map.

  “You don’t have any smutty photographs?” she asked Fletcher—a question, but in a tone of disapproval. Photographs of scantily clad women, or women clad in nothing at all. They were easy to carry and brought a high value in trade with the troops. Rumor had it you could get five gallons of gas for a single long-legged blond.

  We loaded the jeep and headed down roads everywhere under construction, men in uniform repairing the bomb damage so supplies could be moved to the front. We crossed pontoon bridges straddling rivers and drove through forests stripped of their leaves, and often of limbs, too. Old men and women and children walked with their possessions neatly stacked in wheelbarrows or baby buggies, making their way to whatever was left of their homes. Fletcher stopped the jeep again and again—at farms and villages—trying to trade for gasoline. Petrol, he called it, which I’d always found charming, but the word now grated. There was none to be found—not in trade for cigarettes or for food or for smutty photographs.

  At a stone cottage with a steep red roof at the edge of a cemetery, a woman with four boys and a single girl looking out from behind her, all thin and gaunt, said in rapid French, “Les Américains . . . pas de . . . Non.” The same story we’d heard everywhere: whatever gasoline the Germans hadn’t taken, the Allied forces moving through had. And still there were military vehicles abandoned at the side of the road, always with their gas tanks empty. There were abandoned jerry cans everywhere, each one smelling of gasoline but offering none.

  I went to the jeep, dug out a dozen ration tins, ones still with the biscuits, and five extra chocolate bars, and I took them back to the woman and thanked her anyway. We climbed into the jeep, and Fletcher turned the key. The jeep did not start. We sat there, looking to the cemetery, crosses paired back to back as if to protect one another. It was daylight, but still it seemed so clearly a cemetery unblessed by the moon.

  The little girl emerged from the cottage, chocolate rimming her mouth, her pinafore worn but clean. She glanced back to the door, as if uncertain of the task she’d been put to or worried about being caught doing some forbidden thing. I found myself ridiculously wanting the girl to come to me rather than to Liv.

  “Maman m’a dit de vous dire qu’il y aura un peu d’essence dans le hangar pres du cimetière,” she said, chirping like a little bird as she nodded in the direction of all those crosses she looked out at every day.

  I pointed to the shack at the far edge of the cemetery. “Cette petite . . .” Not able to call up the word she’d just used. There would be gas in a . . . hanger? I was so tired.

  “Maman dit si vous n’avez pas besoin de tout cela, laissez ce que vous pouvez.” She glanced back at her mother, now watching through the narrow strip between the front door and the jamb. “S’il vous plaît,” the little girl said earnestly. “Maman dit s’il vous plaît laissez ce que vous pouvez.” Please take only as much gas as you need. Please. Her mother emphasizing that her daughter must be polite in the same way my own mother would have.

  “Comment vous appelez-vous, ma jeune amie?” I asked the girl.

  “Je m’appelle Ange.”

  Yes, of course you are, I thought. Angel. Someday, if I had a little girl, perhaps I would name her Angel, too.

  “Ange, s’il vous plaît, dites à votre mère que nous allons prendre juste assez pour nous rendre à la ville voisine,” I said. Tell your mother we will take only the gas we need to get to the next town. This family wouldn’t need the gasoline to flee as long as the Allied advance continued, but we couldn’t guarantee them that.

  “Merci, Ange,” I said, remembering my own manners.

  I pulled out a handful of vanilla caramels and handed them to her, and kissed the top of her head. She disappeared back into the house, the door closing behind her as we set off on foot over the graves to find a ten-liter can of gas, labeled in French—gasoline someone had hoarded since the Germans took over northern France. We poured half of it into the gas tank and returned the rest to the cemetery shed.

  Smoke on the horizon not long before dusk was thick in our lungs and gritty in our mouths by the time we reached the next village. Several houses were on fire and the town was deserted—no people, no animals, nothing but the heat and crackle of flames. At a crossroads a minute later, we nearly hit an ambulance careering around the corner. We followed it toward a sudden loud sound, a gunshot maybe. The world grew louder: shots, yes, and the crank of machine gears, trucks, and then voices shouting.

  We were stopped some distance from a château by an American soldier who told us the Germans who’d occupied the village were holding the townspeople captive inside. Allied soldiers surrounded the château, and the Germans had just sent out a French girl with an offer of surrender. The Civil Affairs scouts were already there, organizing a hospital and food. One was trying to determine if any townspeople had escaped being rounded up and might now help identify conspirators and Germans among those who would emerge from the château.

  “The lousy bastards always surrender at dusk,” the soldier told Fletcher, addressing him as if Liv and I weren’t there. “So’s they can slip out in the dim light, mixed in with the townspeople, pretending to be the fucking French. And they always tell us th
ere’s less townspeople than there is, so we’ll be short-handed, so’s we won’t have enough soldiers to sort out the phonies.” The soldier spit at the ground. “Goddamn Krauts.”

  Riflemen lined the road to the château, and people began emerging through the heavy front doors. The sick and the injured came first, some bandaged already, some bleeding raw and wounded from Allied fire or German abuse or both. After the wounded came the children, little sisters and brothers gripping tightly to one another’s hands, stumbling, followed by mothers carrying babies or bundles, or pushing carriages piled high with possessions. They wore the same numb expressions as did the men shuffling behind them, exhausted and dazed. Only the nuns—three nuns walking together, their chins raised—looked undefeated. They walked side by side but not touching, their bodies isolated, their habits and winged coronets improbably white among the bundle-carrying crowd, against the smoke drifting across the sky.

  Liv watched the procession with a hopefulness that made me ache. Looking for her brother, I could see that. I wondered if she could see it herself.

  Fletcher photographed the château where the Germans had chosen to hole up. I uncapped my pen, the familiar motion soothing, and began with the soldier’s words. I didn’t suppose any publication would run the word “bastards,” but I wanted to record the truth of it.

  A French teenager identified to the Civil Affairs scouts as a patriot now stood among several soldiers at the far side of the road, scanning the emerging townspeople. He pointed to a middle-aged man and said something, and a soldier pulled the man from the line, frisked him for weapons, and led him off the road at gunpoint. Liv caught the sequence with a long lens as I described it in the best words I could find. A second man—a pathetic-looking, stoop-backed old Frenchman in a dark beret—was pulled from the crowd, too, and a younger woman with a toddler in a rabbit coat. The child did not want for soap and warm water, I thought as Liv’s shutter clicked. The child ate candy and beef.

  I avoided Fletcher’s gaze as he, too, watched the toddler.

  She had beautiful silken hair against the pure white fur, the girl did. The mother held her hand. How did you lay the responsibility for what would happen to them on the shoulders of a schoolboy who ought to be thinking about soccer balls and girls’ breasts? How did you blame a mother for what she did to protect her child?

  The injured were helped to the side of the road, loaded on stretchers, and whisked off in ambulances. There were tears and hugs, and there were skirmishes, too, angry words and sometimes blows exchanged before, almost inevitably, one of the group would be pulled from the crowd and escorted off at gunpoint. An old woman somehow found the energy to spit on one—a German soldier trying to blend in or a collaborator, I wasn’t sure which. Liv raised her camera just in time to catch the spittle coming from her pursed lips.

  I watched the nuns: the coronets, the heavy crosses at their chests, the rosaries hanging at their waists. The taller one reminded me of Sister Mary Alice, who taught me in the third grade. She’d once said of my father that he was in God’s hands, that I had to pray for him—maybe God would listen to me. I’d imagined my father in heaven, but I saw as I stood watching those nuns that she’d meant that my father, whoever he was, was a sinner. Sister Mary Alice would think Liv’s father a sinner, too, in limbo at best. People who killed themselves didn’t go to heaven. “Thou shalt not kill.” And yet in war, if you didn’t kill you were court-martialed. You were a coward. You were shamed.

  A boy was pulled from the line, his civilian shirt far too small, his civilian slacks too short and baggy for his gawky-thin frame. He had pale, smooth cheeks and a prominent Adam’s apple, and his eyes were wide-set and sunken, like the German from the woods, the boy Liv had commanded to find her brother in words he couldn’t understand.

  “Do you suppose there is a god anywhere who listens to any of us?” I asked.

  Liv photographed the boy straight on to capture the shame in his eyes. She lowered the camera and took in the scene unaided by the lens.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  I looked to the jeep with its empty driver’s seat, my bedroll in the back where I’d stuffed it that morning after waking up to Fletcher and Liv entwined.

  Several overly young, overly indignant French resistance fighters looked to be badgering the pathetic old Frenchman in the beret. They raised their long rifles and pointed at his chest, and he climbed reluctantly into a jeep that motored away. Liv took off, running after them despite the American guard’s protests, and Fletcher took off after her. I felt too dispirited to do anything but lope along well behind them.

  At the other side of the road, the jeep with the old man was nowhere to be seen.

  Fletcher grabbed an American soldier who was halfheartedly guarding the road. “Where did they go?” he demanded, loud enough for me to hear from yards away.

  The soldier shrugged.

  “Which way!”

  “He’s a German spy, that’s what they told me,” the soldier said, and he nodded toward the back of the château.

  Fletcher said, “But they’ll—”

  “Been ratting on his own neighbors, that’s what they said.”

  Liv was already sprinting toward the back of the château. Fletcher followed, calling, “Liv! No!” His camera in its case thumping at his hip.

  Behind us, a line of surrendering Germans marched with hands overhead in one direction as Allied soldiers marched in the other, rifles at the ready and grenades hanging from their lapels. The mother and toddler were being escorted by soldiers to a building already swept for mines, to answer questions or perhaps to refuse to answer. Which would be safer for the child now? For the mother to tell the truth or to lie or to say nothing at all while the girl sat alone in the next room, sucking on a red Life Saver from the pocket of her rabbit coat?

  When I rounded the corner of the château, finally, the old man was standing before a stone garden wall in the distance, beret in hand, with the Frenchmen lined up several yards away, rifles raised and aimed. Liv was rushing toward them, meaning to stop the firing squad or simply to get the photograph—I couldn’t tell.

  Fletcher, twenty paces behind her, called out, “Liv!”

  “Liv!” I called, too. “Liv, no!”

  She raised her camera, her hands working the focus as she kept running, her camera swinging toward the lust in the Frenchmen, the blankly staring eyes of the collaborator.

  “Feu!”

  The rifles fired, the bitter smell of cordite filling the air.

  I got the photo,” Liv said in the canvas-musty darkness of the pup tent that night—proudly and sadly and irritably all at once. She and Fletcher had argued the whole evening about it: Liv insisting she’d photographed exactly what he was forever demanding she shoot—the old man’s face just before he was executed, and just afterward—and Fletcher saying if Liv rushed into gunfire like that again he would personally escort her to the nearest MP.

  “I got the photo,” she repeated. “What does Fletcher want from me?”

  When I didn’t reply, she asked, “Jane, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, stuffing down all the things I wanted to say, starting with the ridiculousness of anyone being okay just hours after we’d watched an old man being stood against a garden wall and shot by his neighbors.

  “Does your arm hurt? Maybe I should unwrap it and have a look?”

  “My arm is fine.”

  We lay there for a long time, listening to the quiet sounds of Fletcher cleaning his lenses in the dark.

  “I was the one who found my father, Jane,” Liv said finally. “I took a cup of coffee up to his room, but his bed was empty. I can still see the pattern of the coffee spill on the basement stairs as clearly as I can see my father’s face.”

  I turned toward her, taking her hand, saying, “Oh, Liv,” embarrassed at my anger.

  She said, “His eyes were just at the level of mine as I came down the basement stairs, calling for him.”

>   The newspapers had said she and Geoff went down to the basement together, but in truth she alone had found their father, she said. The old photo of him the newspapers had run left the impression that he looked in death as he had always looked, that his eyes were the same kind eyes that had greeted his patients, and his shoulders were still broad and square, and the only difference was that where he usually had a tie and a stethoscope, he’d chosen instead to wear a rope.

  Charles is wrong about not showing the faces, Fletcher had insisted. It’s the faces that make the deaths real.

  The face Liv had photographed that day, though—the man killed by the firing squad—wasn’t a hero. I wondered if she realized that. The man was charged with betrayal, like my own father had betrayed me by never claiming me as his daughter, like Liv’s father had betrayed her by putting his own grief before hers and Geoff’s. Liv’s grief leaked around the edges when she talked about photographs—Imagine that, Livvie—and she was not able to understand how much her mother must have loved her, how hard it must have been for her mother to die before her children were grown, how much she must have wanted to leave Liv with something to carry her through her grief.

  They were her mother’s eyes—that was what Liv had said about the woman celebrating atop the old car in Paris. Her mother’s eyes, and Liv’s camera trained on them looking directly back at her, as if by stripping away all the light and shadow Liv might understand what it was that her mother meant for her.