Ever since the early part of June, refugees from Paris and other parts of occupied France had been streaming through Aix-les-Bains. Some were headed for Switzerland while others were looking for any place to stay where they could be safe from the Germans.
Our town always had many people coming in the summertime—sick people who came to take the thermal baths and drink the waters, and well people who came for fun—to enjoy the beautiful beaches along the Lac du Bourget, and all the special summer entertainments. There were concerts in the park, gambling in the casino, and plays in the theater. In the summer the population of Aix-les-Bains was two or three times what it normally was.
And now, this summer, there were many more people than usual. But they had not come for the waters or the summer amusements. For weeks now, the town was bursting with them. At the
crèmerie,
you had to wait on a line that sometimes stretched out into the street, and often you were lucky to get any cheese at all. M. Lantin, the baker, had hired two extra men and was now baking days as well as nights, but the bread tasted different. It was not as good.
Every night at our house, there were at least one or two guests for dinner, and sometimes they stayed the night. They told stories—frightening, sickening stories. Maman would glance at Jacqueline or me, and once she even shook her head, and nobody spoke until we left the room. Most of the guests were Jewish.
I didn’t believe those stories. I asked Jacqueline if she believed them. Sometimes at night we heard the grownups talking and even crying while we lay in bed. Jacqueline said she believed the stories. She said maybe the Germans would come and take away Danielle, her doll, and put her in prison. Sometimes she cried, and then I held her and told her stories about Atlantis, and she felt better. Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes Maman had to come in and take Jacqueline into her own bed.
Berthe and Isaac came to us toward the end of June. They were cousins of Maman, and had run away from Hitler first from a village called Turek in Poland and then from Paris. Berthe was very fat. She put curlers in her hair every night, and sang songs all day. Isaac liked to kiss her. Maman said they were newlyweds, but when I asked her, Berthe said they had been married nearly two years.
“How can you call them newlyweds?” I asked Maman. “They have been married nearly two years.”
“Yes,” said Maman, “but they really haven’t had a chance to enjoy being married. They’ve had to keep on running away from the Germans, first from Poland and now from Paris.”
“But now they won’t have to run any more, will they, Maman ? The Germans will never come here, will they ?”
“I hope not,” Maman said. “They have signed a treaty, saying they will stay in the occupied part of France, but they have signed other treaties which they have broken.”
Berthe and Isaac decided to remain in Aix-les-Bains. Isaac was a carpenter, and he went around looking for a job, but nobody needed him. There weren’t enough jobs to go around. Maman said he could help her with the business until Papa came home. She also said they could stay with us until they found a place for themselves. Jacqueline and I slept in Maman’s bed, and Isaac and Berthe slept in our bed. When Papa came home, I could sleep on the sofa and Jacqueline could sleep in two chairs pushed together.
Now Maman and Isaac left early in the morning for the markets. When we came home from school, we found Berthe waiting for us with our favorite snack of bread and butter and chocolate, and hot tea. Berthe only went out of the house to do the shopping. The rest of the time she stayed indoors, and cooked and cleaned, and curled her hair and polished her fingernails. She was always polishing her fingernails, and she did ours too. Sometimes she did our toenails. She had many little bottles of fingernail polish, and let us choose the color we wanted. Once Jacqueline asked her to use a different color on each fingernail, and she did.
She was so fat that her fingers looked like little pink sausages. But her skin was beautiful, and when she put rouge on her cheeks, they were like soft, juicy peaches. In the afternoon, if we stayed in, Berthe sang songs for us—all about love and fickle girls and unfaithful men. Most of the songs were in Yiddish or Polish.
She told us how Isaac lived in the same town as she but never noticed her, although she had always noticed him. One day, when she was all dressed up, very beautifully, in a dark purple dress, and wearing the same shade of fingernail polish that Jacqueline was presently wearing, she sat near him at a cafe, and they began talking. One thing led to another, and here they were, happily married.
Berthe believed in dressing up for a man. On most days she tried to put on a clean dress, comb her hair out, and have her fingernails all done by the time he came home. But sometimes she forgot to take out the curlers, or other times if she took out the curlers, she might forget to put on a clean dress. But Isaac never seemed to notice. You could hear his quick footsteps hurrying up the stairs. He would burst into the room, and not stop until he found her.
It was very romantic but it was a pity that she was fat, and that he had such large, yellow teeth.
Sometimes Berthe sat outside on the
veranda
with us. Now that it was July, we kept the windows open most of the time. I could lean out and watch for Papa.
Jacqueline and Berthe were sitting around the table looking through some magazines, and talking about clothes.
“You see this white voile dress with the sweetheart neckline, and the lace on the hem? Well, I had a dress exactly like that, with a little fuller sleeve, and a strawberry pattern instead of the rose—but otherwise just the same—and that was when Isaac took me to the movies for the first time. I wore it with a pink flower in my hair, and a pair of shoes—I still have them—white, with very high heels. I’ll show them to you. But
oi!,
they were so tight, I could hardly walk. But the dress, I had to leave in Poland. We left so fast, I had to leave most of my nice things.”
“Here, look at this one, Berthe. Isn’t it pretty?”
“I don’t know. It’s not my color, and it’s very matronly.”
“What’s my color, Berthe?”
“Your color? With a face like yours, every color is your color. Of course, some people say that pink is not a good color for redheads.”
“But I love pink.”
“Now I don’t say it, but some people say it.”
“Maman said she’ll make me a pink dress for the summer, and a matching one for Danielle.”
“Your Maman, she certainly is a wonder! But I had a friend who had red hair. She wasn’t a beauty like you, but still she managed to get a husband, and she used to wear green all the time.”
“I hate green.”
The breeze was warm, and it was good feeling my hair blowing against my cheek. For days now, I had been watching for my father, and today, I was going to try a charm that my classmate, Marie, told me about. You had to close your eyes, cross them, and say the name of the person you wanted to work the spell on backwards. Then you uncrossed your eyes, opened them, and holding your breath you said what you wanted to happen. I knew how to say my father’s name backwards—NAMEIN DIVAD.
I looked up the street and saw Jacques Romaines and Jean Flandin on their bikes, Mme. Henri and her daughter carrying packages and hurrying along the street.
I closed my eyes, but it did not seem to me that I was able to cross them when they were closed. So I opened them again, crossed them, closed them, but I felt they became uncrossed once I closed them. I wondered if the spell would work if I kept my eyes open. I opened my eyes, and there, coming up the street, was my father.
“Papa,” I screamed, “Papa, Papa, Papa!”
He had been moving slowly up the street, but when I began calling he started to run. I yelled to Jacqueline and Berthe, “It’s Papa. Really—it’s Papa!” Then I rushed through the apartment, down the stairs, and up into his arms, just as he was about to open the downstairs door.
“Papa!”
He had been sick. First his toe had been broken by a car, driven by officers in his division who were fleeing from the battle at Sedan. Still he had managed to keep in front of the Germans, but later there had been fever and cramps, perhaps from some water he drank. For weeks he lay in a makeshift hospital. The doctor had promised to notify us. He thought we knew where he was.
Maman made him get into bed after she came home. All of us sat around him in the bedroom, and he told us how there had been no fighting, just running, how they had been betrayed by their leaders.
“But you’re home, David,” my mother said, “and you’re safe.”
My father shook his head. “They’ve taken France, and soon it will be England. Nobody is safe.”
“Don’t worry about it now,” Maman said softly. She plumped up the pillows, and smoothed the blankets. “Rest now. Sleep! It will all work out, you’ll see.” She took Jacqueline by the hand, and the rest of us stood up.
“But Papa,” Jacqueline said, “where is my present?”
“Present?”
“You promised, Papa.” Jacqueline was close to tears. “You said when you came home you would bring me a present.”
Maman shook her head, and said, “What a time to ask for presents. Thank God, Papa is home safe. What is the matter with you?”
Big tears rolled down Jacqueline’s cheeks. She bit her lip but didn’t say anything.
“Of course,” Papa said. “How could I forget? Go,
chérie,
look in my knapsack. Down toward the bottom. There is something for you, and something for Nicole. All those months we sat around waiting and waiting. I didn’t forget. And look for something wrapped in a scarf, too. That’s for Maman.”
There were two lockets that he had made out of wood. They were heart-shaped, and one had a fancy J on it, and the other had an N. The locket was hinged, and opened up for pictures.
Papa had made a box for Maman. It was inlaid with many different pieces of wood, and was very beautiful.
“But David,” Maman said, “I can’t believe it. You never did anything like this before. You hardly knew how to hammer in a nail.”
“There was nothing else to do,” Papa said. “Thousands and thousands of soldiers, sitting and waiting with nothing to do.”
“Maman.” Jacqueline had hung her locket on a pink ribbon, and kept looking down at it on her chest. “Please, Maman, may I look through the pictures? I want you on one side and Papa on the other. Please, Maman, may I look at the pictures now—
right now!”
Papa slid down under the covers, and closed his eyes. “But it’s good to be home,” he said.
October 1941
For three nights nobody had slept over at our house. Sunday morning, Jacqueline went bouncing around singing at the top of her lungs.
“Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre
Mironton, Mironton, Mirontaine
Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre
Ne sait quand reviendra
Ne sait quand reviendra
Ne sait quand reviendra
.
”
["Malbrouck goes to war
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine
Malbrouch goes to war
Don't know when he'll come back
Don't know when he'll come back
Don't know when he'll come back."]
She climbed on the sofa and the chairs in the living room, and crept under the dining room table.
“Jacqueline,” I said, “stop it. You’ll wake Maman and Papa.”
But she didn’t stop, and I was enjoying myself too. It was good not having anybody sleeping on the sofa. It was better not having to creep silently around the house, and have Maman say, Shh, you’ll wake this one or that one. I knew Maman and Papa were awake anyway. They were so used to getting up around five every day that even on Sundays they seldom slept past six or six-thirty.
They were awake, in bed, talking to each other, and they smiled when Jacqueline came bounding in, and leaped into the bed, snuggling right between them.
“No more people,” she announced. “I don’t want any more people coming here ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever
...
”
“That’s enough, Jacqueline,” Maman said.
“
...
ever, ever, ever, ever
...
”
“That’s ENOUGH!”
“Ever!”
I jumped into bed with them too, and my mother put an arm around me. She was wearing a peach-colored rayon nightgown, and I laid my head on her shoulder and felt the coldness of her nightgown on part of my face, and the warmth of her skin on the other part.
“Why do they always have to come here?” I said. “Why do we always have to be the ones who get stuck? The Rostens never have people staying over, and they have much more room than we do.”
Maman stroked my hair. She didn’t say anything. Neither did Papa. Jacqueline began chanting again, but different this time, “No more people, never, never, never
...
”
Papa grabbed her, and tickled her, and she laughed and kicked around until Maman and I yelled for them to stop.
Then Papa got up to make some coffee for Maman and himself. Every Sunday, Papa got up first and made coffee. Maman moved over so that she could be between Jacqueline and me, and each of us could get an equal share of her.
“It’s so much better when we don’t have anybody else around,” I said. “There’s never any room to play, and I hate always having to be the last one to use the toilet.”
Maman laughed. “You know we have no choice, Nicole. All those poor people, uprooted from their homes because of the Germans. We’re so lucky to be living here. It’s the least we can do to help other people in real trouble.”
“But why do they have to come
here?”
I asked. “Why can’t they go some other place?”
“Where?” Maman asked.
“Anywhere—but not here.”
“There is no anywhere left,” Maman said, Germany has conquered just about every country in Europe, except for Switzerland.”
“Maman,” Jacqueline asked, “will the Germans come here?”
“I hope not,
ma petite”