The Girl in the Blue Beret

51.



HE COULD STILL HEAR HER VOICE AS HE DROVE THE RENTED Citroën down small country roads. He meandered along the lay of the land, with no compass headings, no map check. He was flowing aimlessly through the countryside. He circled and wound through vineyards and villages. It was a soft, gray day.

Not far from a military base, he parked on a side road while trios of fighters screamed overhead, mad birds against a gray sky. He stayed a long time and watched for more.

Then, at a small café in a village twenty kilometers south of Angoulême, he studied the Michelin map of the Charentes and drank an express. He had been drinking a great deal of coffee. The strong European coffee agreed with him, sharpened him. The waiter, a small middle-aged man in horn-rimmed glasses, glanced his way.

“C’est tout? Anything more, monsieur?”

“Non, merci.”

He had to think. He couldn’t think. In his mind, Annette was the young girl again. He saw the gentle outlines of her innocent face, her spirited teasing, her panache. The horrors she described had been inflicted on that young girl. As she related her sufferings, he became the young guy she had risked her life for. He had known so little then. There were only faint whispers, averted eyes. He had been ignorant. Maybe he had never learned anything truly important until these last few days.

He was in the car again, driving.

A girl in a summer dress digging sod in the snow, hacking out stumps, shivering with ragged, hungry women. The blasts of icy wind cut through them. They chopped through ice and slogged through mud, making a bed for an airstrip. Annette and her mother, balled together like a pair of socks tunneled into each other. Crowds of shriveled women like flocks of chickens scratching in dirt.

Monique and her doll; Annette and her mother. Mother and child roulé en boule, the mother almost dead but refusing to die, the daughter refusing to abandon her mother. So many women packed together—filthy, debilitated women dragging one another on the Death March. The Russian soldiers offering a cow, in kindness.

She hadn’t told him everything. She balked at some of her memories. She spoke of the “depravity,” as if one ugly word could sum it up, but she wouldn’t say more. He had to fill in the blanks. Rape? Mutilation? She mentioned the young women at Ravensbrück who were called “rabbits.” Nazi doctors carved up these women’s legs to study gangrene. She described the Walzkommando—a giant roller for smoothing roadbeds. Women who were being punished had to pull it until they collapsed. What she wouldn’t say about the colossal chimney behind the kitchen at Ravensbrück made him cringe. She dismissed that strange burnt odor greeting new arrivals. She had not told him the worst.

He wanted to scream, hit, crush—something. His own past was splintered by her tale. It was falling into a new design. He wanted to see his long-dead mother again. He wanted to apologize to Loretta, to make up for all the slights and indiscretions, anything he had ever done wrong. He wanted to tell his children all his memories of the war, and all of Annette’s. His breathing was like the labored gasping of a rickety antique machine. He couldn’t fill his lungs. Highway markers danced in the periphery of his vision as if fractured by raindrops.

A team of red-clad bicyclists passed him, rushing and melting together like a swarm of birds. He thought of bombers forming up. As an obtuse youth, he had crashed into a strange land. And thinking only of himself, he had fled the scene, alone.

Annette.

She had saved his precious hide. And her reward was the hell of Ravensbrück and Koenigsberg.

He pulled over to the side of the road, his body shaking. He parked beside a vast vineyard. The grapevines—spindly, twisted trunks held by posts and wire supports—were disciplined like soldiers in straight rows. He examined the vines, the way their tendrils wrapped around the wires and even around themselves. Some of the tendrils waved in the air, seeking a hold.

If Mary or Albert asked him how his summer in France was going, where would he begin?

Starting up again, he was scarcely aware of the car or the road. Annette would meet him later at the train station in Angoulême, in her small blue Renault. He was returning the rental car.

She had borne two children; she had grandchildren.

She was beautiful.

He writhed in sympathetic pain. The women, crowded and cold and starved.

The sky was clearing, and clouds were drifting in from the Atlantic—white puffs, the kind of cloud that was so satisfying to see from above. An infinite, rolling field of white.


AT THE TRAIN STATION, he sat in the car, the engine off. He listened to the whistle of an approaching train. It was her idea that he return the rental and use her car, but she hadn’t insisted.

Her voice was still echoing in his mind—her fervor in telling him things she had stored up for so long, the pitch of her voice rising as a memory overcame her. She trusted him enough to tell him more than she had ever told anyone else. It was a special honor, an obligation he couldn’t calculate.

He thought about the nurses at the Polish hospital, and he pictured the piano that the Germans had stolen from someone’s home.





52.



MARSHALL HAD HESITATED ABOUT GIVING HER THE BLUE BERET. But after they returned from the train station, he fetched the berets from his bag upstairs, carrying them behind his back as he entered the kitchen, where she was snipping the ends from thin green beans.

“Something for comic relief,” he said, handing her the blue beret.

She stared at it for a moment, then laughed with pleasure. She wiped her hands on her apron and set the beret on her head, pulling it down to one side. He followed her into the sitting room, where there was a large mirror above a sideboard. She adjusted the beret to a jauntier angle.

“Oh, if only I had had my beret at Koenigsberg! I had the red socks I was wearing when we were arrested. But soon they were thin and faded.”

“I bought myself a beret too, like the one I had in ’44.” He slapped on his black one, and she reached up to position it for him.

“That’s better,” she said, touching the back of her hand gently to his temple.

“Julien Baudouin,” he said, saluting their images in the mirror. “Stonemason, from Blois. Or was I a bricklayer?”

“I’d recognize you anywhere.”

They stared into the mirror together and laughed at themselves.

“I hope this isn’t inappropriate,” he said. “I heard that a fascist youth group wore blue berets. Can that be true?”

“They were not significant,” she said, brushing away the idea. “And the blue beret was only my school hat.”

“I remember in the Pyrenees, the Basques wore their berets laid flat on top of their heads,” he said.

“That’s the Basque way. I think their beret must fly off.” She laughed and removed her beret. She set it on a chair and smiled up at him, maybe remembering the day she guided a young pilot out of the train station.

He felt at ease with her. He wanted to hold her all day. But she awed him. What would she expect of him?

She finished the green beans and led him out to sit on the terrace with the omnipresent Bernard, who seemed to stay closer to her since last evening. Marshall sat in a wicker chair, and she sat in a chaise longue with her feet up, her hands folded.

“I have a proposal,” she said, her smile holding a hint of mischief. “For us.”

“What?”

“Our hike the other day was like an excursion for schoolgirls. We need something more vigorous!”

“Where to?” He shaded his eyes from the sun’s glare.

“A real hike. Across the Pyrenees to Spain!”

He was flabbergasted.

“Mon Dieu, Annette, why would I want to do that again?”

“We could go together.”

“The last place on earth I’d want to take you! It was torture.”

“It would be different now. You had to sneak over at night on smugglers’ paths, while pursued by Germans!” Her hands were moving enthusiastically, like butterflies courting.

“It was an adventure, bien sûr!”

“Didn’t you tell me it was a ‘breeze’?” she asked teasingly.

“I was being macho, I guess. You know—manly.”

“Eh oui,” she said.

“But why would we want to go there now?”

She rose from her chair and leaned close to him, her hand on his shoulder. “My family sent so many boys over the mountains—the aviateurs. And we didn’t know how the crossing went for them.”

“Oh. You want to go through that?”

“Oh, it wouldn’t be the same thing—the trails are very good now—but it is the idea of going to that place.” She ruffled his hair. “We will search for some maps. It will be a breeze.”

“Are you serious? Could you do it? Could I?”

“Dédée de Jongh did it more than thirty times in the war. In the dark! She was young, to be sure, but we must not surrender to age. She followed the route with the roaring river to cross, but we can follow a different way. You know about Dédée, do you not?”

“Yes, I do.” He recalled Nicolas telling him about the Belgian woman who organized one of the first escape lines for airmen. “Won’t we need a clandestine, a passeur—one of those mountain guides?” he joked.

She laughed. “But we don’t have to be smuggled, Marshall! The trails are good now, and well marked. We can join a hiking group. And now is the best time to go. The snows are melted. People will be out on the trails. It will be merry!”

She sat on his knee for a moment and hugged him, then jumped up and stood facing him. Her face glowed in the late-afternoon sunlight.

“We could go to the national park,” she said. “We could even go through Andorra. Or we could take the easiest way, down below Perpignan along the Mediterranean. You see, I have studied this matter.”

“Will there be Coke stands?” He laughed.

She smiled, and in the bright light he could see tiny scars on her chin, faint little zigzags. They did not interrupt her loveliness.

“I’m glad I bought those berets,” he said. “We’ll get cold at night.”

“Ah, bien, I did not doubt your spirit of adventure. This will be a test. And thereafter we can say with pride, ‘We did that!’ ”

“How long have you been thinking of this?”

“About five minutes. When you mentioned the Basques.” Her smile dissolved. “But really, those mountains have been on my mind for years. I do much hiking, but I always avoided the high mountains. All the boys we sent across …” She frowned, then touched his shoulder affectionately. “But with you, I thought suddenly—now is the time. I would like to cross the mountains with you.”

Marshall was pacing the length of the terrace now. The Pyrenees had troubled his sleep for years, dark images of rugged heights and rocky canyons, cold and unforgiving.

“I would worry about you,” he said. “The Pyrenees are dangerous. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Pfft!” she said, flipping her fingers outward. “If I could build an airstrip with my bare hands, I could hike up a mountain!”

“That was long ago,” he said.

“And this is now,” she said.


“AT YOUR AGE? You’ve got to be kidding, Dad.”

“I’ve got new boots.”

“Still, if the airlines won’t let you fly, then what does that say? I never knew you to be an athlete.”

Albert had driven from Manhattan to the house in New Jersey and had arrived just as the telephone rang.

“I’ve done nothing but walk since I got to France,” Marshall said, almost defensively.

“What about altitude sickness?” Albert said. “Oh, sorry, I guess you’ve spent half your life at high altitudes.”

“This is not Mount Everest,” Marshall said. “There are official hiking trails and rest stations along the way. And I won’t take the most strenuous crossing—not like I did in ’44.”

Besides, he was going with a woman who was an experienced hiker, he told Albert.

“Aha!”

Genial banter moved along the edge of accusation. Marshall ignored it. Everything had to be reconsidered now, he thought. He remembered Albert and Mary in Halloween costumes. He was guiding them down the block, and the evening was growing dark. Mary cried because her witch hat kept falling off. Albert dropped his candy in the dirt and kicked it off the curb. Then, in no time at all, it seemed, they were in graduation gowns—Mary’s hat flying up like a Frisbee, Albert flapping bat wings—and then they were gone.

Albert relayed telephone messages from two of the crew: Chick Cochran and Bobby Redburn. Cochran had heard from someone in Hootie Williams’s hometown who would be writing to Marshall in Paris.

“That’s good,” Marshall said. All the crew was accounted for now.

Hootie. He had thought he was free from the memory of Hootie, but Hootie kept coming back, like the soldier in the old story of Martin Guerre, an impostor who returned to a family that wasn’t his.


IN THE WEEK of busy preparation for the hike, Annette told him nothing more about her deportation to the camps. The book seemed to be closed. “I’ve told you enough,” she said. “Now we can go forward.”

Her resilience, her insistent good nature reasserted themselves. She seemed unburdened now. But he knew that she was willing herself to be strong. He could not look at her now without seeing, behind her mature grace, the thin girl working on the airstrip—hungry, latched to her mother, fighting snow and wind. Death all around her, bodies in the snow.

Annette consulted guidebooks, located a hiking club, and reserved a hotel room at the edge of the mountain pass. By driving up to the pass, they could hike across the border in only a day. It would be simple, she said. He did not want to read the guidebooks. He did not want to go trekking across those mountains again, but he wanted to please her.

He fed the animals, gathered the eggs, cleaned out the horse shed. There was more flower deadheading. Lost in the immediacy of the chores, he relaxed and was content. She would not let him help her snip the ends of green beans, because the task had to be done a certain way with the fingers, and his were too large and clumsy. He wondered at himself as he trundled a wheelbarrow of compost to a fenced-off pile. Back home, his aversion to yard work had been notorious.

At meals, he marveled at the everyday calm of her life now, the ease and expertise of her hands in the kitchen. She fed him well. She was generous but not wasteful. She gave him the last stalk of asparagus. Carefully, she stored the leftovers. The bread would go to the chickens. At the end of each meal, she presented three cheeses—a wedge, a flat slice, and a small round—like treasures brought out on special occasions. Marshall was agog—gorging and lounging in a way he didn’t remember ever doing at home.

Every day, to build up their stamina for hiking, they walked for several miles. They walked early before having coffee and again late in the day. On the terrace, Marshall read a Japrisot mystery novel from Annette’s study shelf. And he browsed through her histories. The workmen had finished the stone walk, and the courtyard was quiet, except for the bees in the ivy. Bernard began sitting at his feet when Annette was busy elsewhere. She arranged for her son and daughter to care for the animals and the garden while she was away. They did not ask suspicious questions, and Marshall suspected they would not be surprised even if their mother planned to learn deep-sea diving, or decided to go to Africa to nurse lepers.

Annette promised to invite Marshall for a grand family Sunday after they returned from the mountains. It would be an important occasion, she cautioned. Her mother, impatient to see him again, would come from Saint Lô. He met the daughter, Anne, briefly, the day before he and Annette planned to drive toward the mountains. He had been apprehensive about meeting Anne, for fear he would see in her the young Annette who was sent in a cattle car to Ravensbrück. There was something familiar in her eyes, but Anne had a less delicate face, straighter hair. She seemed to be the new liberated woman, with her hair cut severely short, her manner brisk.

“Maman, I plan to take Bernard home with me,” she said. “We will come every two days, and Georges will come the other days. Don’t worry. Everything will be just as you want.”

“Bernard, you poor thing,” Annette said, bending to hug the dog. “You would insist on going with me over the mountains if you knew. But now Anne needs you.”

“I’m going to give his face a trim,” Anne said, ruffling the dog’s fur. “Maman, he can hardly see through that curtain.”

“Don’t tease him, Anne.”





53.



THEY WOULD HIKE INTO THE MOUNTAINS ON A WELL-DEFINED trail in the general region where Marshall had crossed the border in 1944, southwest of Oloron-Sainte-Marie. Marshall never knew the exact location of his night crossing.

They drove straight south down from Bordeaux, through an expanse of farmland and villages with gray spires and red-tile roofs. Annette’s car needed brake shoes, so Marshall had rented another car, a small Citroën 2CV. It was like driving a snail, he thought.

They were easy driving companions, and for long stretches they were quiet, only now and then murmuring over scenery or road conditions. She praised his driving, and he congratulated himself on his new alertness at the wheel. He was starting to appreciate the pace on the small French highways—the numerous stops and detours and villages, alternating with straight stretches of earnest speeding. When they stopped for a picnic, he contemplated the leisure of it, the pleasure of the food. She was teaching him to be French. He was Julien Baudouin, grown up.

Marshall had not counted on plunging in so deeply. Getting together with Annette turned out to be both simpler and far more complicated than he had imagined. He faced something that demanded uncommon understanding and intimacy. He was inexperienced. With Loretta he had simply turned the marriage over to her. She ran the marriage, the home, the children, while he flew away.


OLORON-SAINTE-MARIE was an old town lodged in the foothills of the Pyrenees. An ancient church was perched on a hill within the old ramparts. As they drove down the main street a second time, having missed the turn for the hotel, Marshall noted the tabac, the boucherie, the épicerie, the boulangerie-patisserie—the essentials of a French town. A group of schoolchildren was blocking the street, protected by two guides directing traffic. Marshall recalled a flock of sheep in a road once when he was driving with Loretta and the children in Scotland. He remembered his impatience then, but now he could wait.

They would start their hike in two days. It would be fun, not a hardship, she insisted, as they climbed to their room on the third floor of the small hotel. The wooden steps were scarred and creaky.

“We should have had the fourth floor,” she said. “For practice. We’re mountain climbers.”

“We can trot up and down the stairs a few times,” he suggested.

“Oh, I forgot my little kit behind the seat,” she said when they reached the room. “It has my sewing thread, and I see you have a loose button.”

“I’ll get it.”

“We’ll both go. Trot, trot.”


FROM THE WINDOW of their room they could see past the town to green forests, golden farm fields, scattered goats. The line of mountains beyond was obscured by clouds.

“I like this view,” she said. “Maurice and I came here to Oloron-Sainte-Marie for a week one summer. I remember it was so restful.”

Maurice had been a prisoner of war in Germany. Early in their marriage, she said, they had vowed not to dwell on the ordeal of their imprisonment. Together, they forged a life, pushing the past into oblivion.

“It was like after the horror movie ends and the lights come on. We French have a way of going on; the past is past. There had to be a forgiveness. Maurice and I, we never told each other the whole truth. My feeling is that there was more. He may have thought the same of me. Maybe we should have spoken more. But now I am telling you.”

“He didn’t get to know a side of you that I knew—the schoolgirl with the leather book satchel.”

“That time was ours,” she said, busying herself with his loose button. “That is what you have given me again. And with you it is bearable.”

In a few minutes she came to him at the window, her thread extended between the shirt in her left hand and the needle in her right.

“I need more light,” she said.

She finished the button decisively, then sat down on the bed and kicked off her shoes. She sat cross-legged against the pillows and tugged at her bare feet. She was like a young gymnast, he thought.

“You’re staring at me,” she said.

“Every movement you make is extraordinary,” he said. “Annette, how did you manage to come out of the camp with your good nature intact?”

She brought her knees up and hugged them.

“At Koenigsberg many women kept their spirits alive by making things, writing, sewing little things, dolls. It was all clandestine, of course, but as long as we could express ourselves with our hands, we still knew we were women.”

“You were very strong.”

She shrugged. “I was always the optimist,” she said, adjusting the pillow behind her. “Speak about your wife. Was she pretty? Were you proud of her?”

To his surprise, he was glad to talk about Loretta. Framing her in a way that brought her to life for Annette helped him to see her more clearly himself. It occurred to him that his marriage had been similar to Annette’s—two people agreeing not to reveal the worst of themselves, being strong for each other. He was glad to have this thought.

“I couldn’t have had with my wife what I have with you. She could never have understood. I feel bad about that.”

“You will feel guilt over your wife for a long time,” she said. “That is most ordinary—even when there is no reason.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Grandchildren,” Annette said. “It is very sad to me, Marshall, that you have no grandchildren.”


LATER, THEY WALKED OUTSIDE. They found a long stairway up to a high promenade leading to the medieval church at the top of the hill. From the promenade they could see the mountains, a natural fortress rearing along the border between France and Spain. Marshall thought he could see snow but decided it was only the glitter of the afternoon light.

“It is beautiful,” she said.

“Yes, from a distance.” He shaded his eyes and stared toward Spain.

“Are you sure you want to go?” she asked him.

“I’m willing to go—with you.”

“But do you want to go?”

No, he didn’t, but he didn’t say so. He just pointed and said, “It is beautiful.”