The Girl in the Blue Beret

40.



HIS BOOTS GAVE HIM BLISTERS, BUT THE LEATHER WAS GROWING more pliable, and after five days of exploring the city, he considered the boots broken in, ready for action. Everywhere he went he thought about Annette, wanting to see her again, looking forward to seeing her mother again sometime in the future. He missed M. Vallon. Annette had said he had a weak heart.

The week passed quickly. One night he dined with Jim and Iphigénie, who were back from the Dordogne and already planning an August retreat in Switzerland. They sat at a small table on the sidewalk, jammed between two other tables. Marshall was all elbows, and the pedestrians crowding past annoyed him. Jim, however, seemed habituated to Parisian life, charmed by the way Iphigénie constructed an area of privacy around their small table, although they sat precariously perched on the edge of traffic. This was Paris. Marshall gave in. He let the wine stoke up his little glow—the miniature furnace of desire and hope that was burning inside him. His pilot light, he thought ridiculously.

“The Swiss go to Provence in the summer,” Iphigénie said. “But I prefer Switzerland. It’s peaceful. Paris gets too hot.”

“I’d like to go to Tenerife,” said Jim. “I flew there a few times.”

“I would go to Morocco, to Algiers,” said Iphigénie. “I adore the scarves, the jewelry. But I must wait for that.”

“Iffy’s working on a new line of clothes,” Jim explained. “I tried to get her to call it ‘Iffy.’ She’s full of brilliant ideas.”

“The young people dress despicably,” she said. “There is no respect, no style.”

“You are right,” said Marshall.

They listened attentively as Marshall recounted his success finding the girl in the blue beret, and Iphigénie smiled.

“You must take her a beautiful gift, Marshall. I will help you select.”

“I met another woman too.” He told about meeting Odile.

“How does she expect me to find those guys she helped?” he said. Then he heard how ungracious he sounded.

“She seemed desperate?” Iphigénie asked.

“She made a great sacrifice,” Marshall said. “For a couple of fool Americans like me.” Absently, he let the waiter refill his wineglass.

“Those guys should have written her,” Jim said.

Iphigénie touched Jim’s cheek. “What would you have done, mon chéri?”

Later, after Iphigénie went home, Jim and Marshall stopped for a drink at a bar on Jim’s street. Jim had insisted.

“Marshall, I wanted to tell you something I learned. One of Iffy’s cousins told me this at the wedding. I don’t know why. It was hardly a topic for a wedding day. There was a little village not far from Iffy’s family’s house. In 1944, just a few days after D-Day, the Germans decided to destroy this village—out of sheer cussedness, I guess. It was Hitler’s scorched-earth policy. They were in retreat, but as a farewell gesture, they rounded up everybody there and massacred them—in the church! Babies and all. Little kids. They machine-gunned them, then set fire to the place and set off explosions in two or three other places. Over six hundred people got killed. The whole town.”

“The whole town?” Marshall turned to face Jim straight on.

“How can anybody to this day understand that?” Jim said.

Marshall lifted his drink halfway. “The woman with the parachutists said the German officer was very correct. That’s something I’ve heard often. They were so correct. It meant they were precise. But barbarians also. It makes no sense.”

“Here’s what I wanted to tell you, Marshall. One of Iffy’s aunts lived in that village. She had married a shoemaker, and they lived on the main street. Iphigénie has never told me about them. It was her cousin, a serious kind of guy, has a pharmacy or something in Limoges, who told me about it. He seemed hung up on it. He said that de Gaulle decided to leave the village exactly the way it was, a ghost town. This guy said you could go there and see where Iffy’s uncle’s cobbler shop was, and that the man’s sewing machine, the one he stitched the shoes with, was still standing there, all rusty and forlorn-looking. That gave me the willies, just hearing about it.” Jim paused and sipped his Scotch. “Good old Iffy. She’s been through more than I gave her credit for at first.”

Jim drained his Scotch and surveyed the room. Marshall stared toward the mirror behind the zinc bar at the reflection of a young waiter with a tray of drinks. Marshall could not see himself in the mirror.

“I’ll get this, Jim,” he said, reaching for his wad of franc notes.