The Girl in the Blue Beret

21.



IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, WITH STREETLIGHTS AND NOISE streaming through the cracks of the shutters, Marshall tossed with his whirling thoughts. Words and images reverberated—Bourgogne, Lebeau, épicerie, rutabaga.

Bright lights spilled through the cracks of the dilapidated shutters. He needed curtains. He remembered putting up curtain rods for Loretta, screwing metal pieces to the window facings and hooking together the metal tabs of an infernal system of brackets and flat, corrugated rods. He didn’t want to do that again. He could call Mary for advice. But he didn’t want to think about curtains. Or Loretta.

Next morning, he decided to go to the Gare du Nord and try to visualize it in the gray tones of 1944. The station was newer, busier now—no German officers in their olive-drab greatcoats, ballooned trousers, and menacing jackboots. He did not know what track he had arrived on, but as he roamed across the wide expanse of the station, heading toward the trains, he remembered more clearly his first sight of Annette when he arrived from Chauny. She was studying a timetable. On the train he had seen a workman wearing a blue beret, and he was concerned that there might be more than one female in a blue beret and he would follow the wrong one. But she was clearly the girl in the blue beret. Her white socks were slouchy, her shoe soles worn thin, her hair tousled. She wore a wool coat, buttoned up tight, and carried a book satchel. She glanced in his direction but did not acknowledge him or the other airman—Delancey, the navigator from Nebraska. At the end of the platform, she turned and crossed the large atrium of the station, then skipped down some stairs. Marshall and Delancey followed as she led them up and down other stairways and out into the street, then finally down into the bowels of the Métro.

She had zigzagged like a rabbit, Marshall thought now as he tried to re-create that journey.

After stopping for a pack of mints at a kiosk on the main level, he made his way back into the Métro. At a main juncture for train #4, a jazz ensemble with horns, a saxophone, and drums was playing a song he thought he recognized. But there was no reason he should know a popular song, unless it was some unlistenable noise he had been forced to hear from his children. Thinking about his children’s alien, alienating music saddened him. He stood listening to the musicians, young people from a music school identified on their placard. His habit had always been to walk unresponsively past sidewalk acts and beggars. Now he wavered. He made a resolution. If he listened for more than a minute, then he owed them something. He scattered his change onto the square of dark velvet in front of the musicians. A twenty-franc piece jumped the edge, and he stooped to retrieve it. The trumpet started then, blasting Marshall’s ears. He recognized the song now—“Night and Day,” from the forties. Then, as the trumpet soared, it occurred to him that when he arrived here at the Gare du Nord—scared, wearing a Frenchman’s ill-fitting work outfit—his first sight of Annette had formed his chief impression of her, the one that stayed with him. It was her confidence, the way she strode across the crowded station, gliding past German soldiers. It was her carriage, the way she sported her beret as if it were high fashion, not a mundane piece of a school uniform. It was her liveliness, her self-assurance. And yet she was so young. He had immediately felt that he should protect her, not vice versa.

From the Gare du Nord, he took the Métro, changing at Châtelet for the #1 train. He wasn’t certain, but he thought the stop he wanted was the Palais Royal-Louvre. After emerging at the large square, he made his way to the colonnaded shops along the rue de Rivoli.

There had been a photomaton among those shops. One day Annette had guided him there. It was a cubbyhole on a balcony within a department store. He remembered Annette speaking to the woman there. He had practiced his mug shot, in his French dress clothes, and learned “regardez-moi.” The woman placed him against a white wall and aimed the camera at him. “Regardez-moi,” she said. Then, nervously, she packaged his photos in a cellophane sleeve and added a receipt, handwritten elaborately, with several notations. Marshall was eager to leave, but Annette was in no rush. Self-possessed, she exchanged a burble of French jabber with the clerk. Marshall admired Annette’s nonchalance. Finally, with a cheery “Merci, au revoir,” she left the shop ahead of him. He was to walk along the Colonnade, then cross the street and find the bench where she would be waiting in the Tuileries.

Outside, he remembered now, the sun was shining so brightly that the sandy surface of the winter garden, with its bare shrubs and twisted tree limbs, hurt his eyes. He had worn a suit of M. Vallon’s for the occasion. Even though it was tight, he had felt comfortable in the suit jacket, knowing the Germans would not expect an American to wear a French suit coat and tie. He had combed his hair at the photomaton. His photo was rakish, he decided later.

As he approached the bench, she stood and made her way, sans souci, toward the Métro.

At the flat later that day, Annette and her mother worked with the photos, creating a fake ID card for Marshall. Their equipment was kept in a carpetbag, which they were prepared to toss out the rear window in an emergency. The bag contained numerous stamps and specially printed forms to produce work-identity cards. They changed Marshall’s age so that he would be too old for the obligatory work service—the labor camps in Germany.

“It’s hard to think of so many new names,” Annette said with a sigh, as she pored over the telephone directory. “How about François Baudouin? No, there is a François Baudouin. There’s no Julien Baudouin, though.”

“It will be good for a stonemason,” said her mother. “You are a stonemason!”





“HOW DID IT GO at the photomaton?” asked M. Vallon when he returned that day.

“It went well,” Annette said quickly before Marshall could speak. “The photo is handsome. He is a true Frenchman!”

M. Vallon was a fastidious man, well dressed, calm. Marshall had noticed how he brushed his suit every morning before leaving for work, and he carried an umbrella on rain-threatening days.

M. Vallon said, “I was on the rue de Rivoli this morning, before you were there. It was just before noon. There was an unusual quietness, but then in the distance I could hear the German soldiers begin their march. Their marching and their music drifted all the way down the Champs-Elysées.” M. Vallon marched across the room, imitating the Nazi goose steps. “If only they knew how ridiculous they appear to others, they would retreat in humiliation.”

Mme Vallon said gently, “But my dear, if they see you making fun, they will not be amused.”

“One must make fun nevertheless,” said Annette. “Play the innocent! Confuse them with a perfect stream of beautiful French words. ‘Monsieur, you are in France. In France, one speaks French!’ ”

Annette’s mother worked on Marshall’s work-permit card after dinner. Marshall practiced writing his new name, Julien Baudouin, on a sheet of paper before signing the card. He was Julien Baudouin, a stonemason, a tailleur de pierre, born in 1917 in Blois, residing in Montreuil.

That night they heard a commotion in the streets again—a heavy, distant sound, then a siren.

Mme Vallon, regal in her robe, stood with her family in the center of the living room floor. Marshall watched from his doorway. “We have to do something more,” she said. “They only strengthen our resolve.”

M. Vallon embraced his wife and daughters, and they stood together, listening. The siren waned, and then the streets were quiet.

“It could have been anything,” he said.

No one was ready to return to bed, so they sat together for a while in the dark at the dining table. M. Vallon said, “When I was on the rue de Rivoli today, I had to pass the Hôtel Meurice. I was not allowed to walk in front of it, where there is the white barrier, so I walked through the Tuileries for some distance. It sickens me, the enemy headquartered in such a magnificent place, in the heart of the pride of Paris.”

He slammed his fist on the table, an unexpected gesture from this elegant man, Marshall thought.

In the morning Marshall chatted with Annette as she and Monique prepared for school.

He said, “Your parents are magnificent. You too. You’re all very brave.”

“No. We have to be careful, but we must help you. You are our cause. If we don’t help the aviateurs and get them back safely, then we have done nothing.”

He remembered he was sitting on a divan. She leaned over and gave him a quick two-cheek kiss. Then she lifted her satchel and headed for school.

“You are very nice,” she said, turning at the door.


THE PHOTOMATON WAS NO longer there. In its approximate place was a souvenir shop selling gaudy silk scarves, postcards, plastic Eiffel Towers, even berets. The legendary Paris that had been saved from obliteration was now burlesqued by tourist-happy gay Paree. Marshall walked down the Colonnade, past the swank Hôtel Meurice, M. Vallon’s anguished tone echoing in his thoughts. At the place de la Concorde, the view before him was vast and open, like his ardent heart.