The Girl in the Blue Beret

22.



HE WAS LIKING THE WIDE-OPEN SPACES OF PARIS, THE EASE of movement, the pace. One afternoon he strolled through the Jardin des Plantes. Annette had taken him and another aviator to see animals in a large park, but today the layout of the menagerie at the big botanical garden did not seem at all familiar. He stared at the sad apes and headed for the exit on the rue Linné.


“MONSIEUR GUY, BONJOUR!” he said with exaggerated good cheer when he arrived at the Everything Store. Guy was his best friend in this city, he thought rashly.

“Bonjour, Captain, how do you go today?”

“I go just fine today. And you, Guy?”

“Comme-ci, comme-ça. A little of the gallbladder.”

“Quoi?” Marshall didn’t recognize the French term.

“Next to the liver.”

“Too much rich food, Guy?”

Guy shrugged. “It is necessary to eat.”

Marshall enjoyed poking around the store, gabbing with Guy about his stuff. He seemed to be a pack rat. Marshall had recently discovered some artifacts from the forties among the piles of outdated merchandise. He pored through postcards and photos of warplanes and old sheet music, a miscellany scattered among batteries, shower attachments, art supplies, nails. Guy knew that Marshall was a pilot who had been in France during the war and was seeking the past, but he had volunteered little of his own. He had said, “I was only a little child.”

Today Guy pumped him for the story, and Marshall stayed for a long time, telling Guy about hiding out in Paris during the war. Guy listened as though he was turning over a problem in his mind.

Finally Guy said, “I have often heard the older people say to the younger ones, ‘Il vous faudrait une bonne guerre’—you need a good war. They meant so we could understand the hardship of life. But the ones who were résistants would not say that. They were disgusted by war.” He paused and stared into the labyrinth of his store.

“I would not wish a war on my child,” Guy said.


WAITING FOR NICOLAS’S NEXT REPORT, Marshall passed a few days uneventfully, watching himself settle into some vague routines. In the mornings he ate cornflakes or eggs in his kitchen, then went to the tabac up the street for a double express. He liked it better than his own experimental brews. He bought bread from the boulangerie, lugged his laundry to a woman down the block, explored the neighborhood. He walked through the corner church whose bells he heard so frequently. It was the Saint-Pierre de Montrouge, at place Victor Basch. The names were just words to him. He made a circuit of the pews and altars, but he did not know what to look for. He explored Montmartre, ate a croque monsieur at a sidewalk table, and mounted the steps of the Sacré Coeur but didn’t go inside. After buying a small TV from the Everything Store, he found a news-debate program he enjoyed and was pleased that he could more or less follow the fast-talking Frenchmen. He rediscovered jumping jacks and push-ups. He couldn’t find anywhere to buy a pack of peanuts.

At the bank, he changed another two hundred dollars into franc notes. Then reluctantly he arranged to meet Gordon Webb on his next stopover in Paris.