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The next morning, spring finally exploded with all the violence of energy too long restrained. On the Friday afternoon, he caught the train to Vichy.
At the crossing point into the Free Zone, they were all ordered out to have their papers checked. Valois had had no difficulty in getting an Ausweis. When your father was a Vichy deputy and you were a respectable civil servant, you were regarded as quite safe, he thought moodily.
Not everyone was as lucky. Somewhere along the platform an argument had broken out. Voices were raised, German and French. Suddenly a middle-aged man in a dark business suit broke away from a group of German soldiers, ran a little way down the platform, then scrambled beneath the train.
Valois jumped into the nearest carriage to look out of the further window. The man was on his feet again, running across the tracks. He was no athlete and he was already labouring. A voice cried, ‘Halt!’ He kept going. A gun rattled twice. He flung up his arms and fell.
He wasn’t dead, but hit in the leg. Two soldiers ran up to him and pulled him upright. He screamed every time his injured leg touched the ground as he half-hopped and was half-dragged the length of the train to bring him back round to the platform.
Valois turned furiously from the window and made for the platform door. There was a man sitting in the compartment who must have got back in after him.
He said, ‘I shouldn’t bother.’
Valois paused, realizing he recognized the man.
‘I’m sorry? It’s Maître Delaplanche, isn’t it?’
‘You recognize me?’
The lawyer’s face, which was the living proof of his Breton peasant ancestry, screwed up in mock alarm.
‘You’re often in the papers, and I attended several meetings you spoke at when I was a student.’
‘Did you? Ah yes. I seem to recall you now.’ Face screwed up again in an effort of recollection as unconvincing as his alarm. ‘Valois, isn’t it? Christian Valois. Of course. I knew your father when he practised, before politics took him over.’
Delaplanche was well known in legal circles as a pleader of underdog causes. Whenever an individual challenged the State, his opinion if not his counsel would be sought. He had spoken on a variety of socialist platforms but always refused to put the weight of his reputation behind any programme except in his own words, ‘the quest for justice’.
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Valois. ‘Excuse me.’
‘I shouldn’t bother,’ repeated the lawyer as Valois opened the door on to the platform. ‘I presume you’re going to make a fuss about the chap they’ve just shot? I’ll tell you his story. His papers were obviously forged. He made a run for it and got shot. He’ll turn out to be a blackmarketeer, or an unregistered Jew, or perhaps even an enemy agent. All you’ll do is draw attention to yourself and get either yourself or, worse still, the whole train delayed here a lot longer.’
‘That’s bloody cynical!’ snapped Valois. ‘I thought you were famous for fighting the underdog’s battles.’
‘Against the law, not against an army,’ said Delaplanche. ‘Against an army, all the underdog armed with the law does is get fucked!’
He smiled with the complacency of one who was famous for his earthy courtroom language. On the platform German voices were commanding the passengers back on to the train. Delaplanche picked up a newspaper and began reading it. Feeling defeated, Valois stepped down on to the platform but only to return to his own compartment.
His gloom lasted till the train pulled into the station at Vichy, but lifted at the sight of his sister, long black hair streaming behind her, running down the platform to greet him.
They embraced. Since he last saw her she’d become a young woman and a very beautiful one. She tucked her arm through his in delight and led him to where their mother was waiting.
‘Where’s father?’ asked Valois as they approached.
‘Busy. He sends his apologies.’
‘No. I understand. Without his constant efforts, the country would be ground down under the conqueror’s heel.’
‘Shut up and behave! I don’t want my birthday spoilt!’
He just about managed to obey the injunction, but there were difficult moments. Vichy disgusted him with its opulent façades all draped with tricolours. Everywhere he looked, red, white and blue, like make-up on a leprous face. He preferred the stark truth of those swastikas he could see from his office window flapping lazily over the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli. The people, most of them, were the same. ‘Like characters on a film set,’ he told his sister. ‘Or worse. Vichy is like a folk-tale village in a pop-up book. Only a child thinks it’s really magic.’
‘I agree,’ said Marie-Rose. ‘It’s so boring here. That’s why I want to come back to Paris with you!’
He looked at her in alarm. This was the first he’d heard of this idea and the more he thought about it, the less he liked it. In Paris, by himself, his decisions only concerned himself; it was a time of danger and it would get worse.
He tried to explain this to Marie-Rose and they quarrelled. But by way of compensation, he found an area of common ground with his father who was absolutely opposed to any such move.
Indeed he and his father kept the peace till the time came to part. His mother presented him with a bag full of ‘goodies’ and his father with a piece of paper.
‘It’s a permit to use the car, the Renault. I’ll want to use it myself whenever I come to Paris and it’s absurd for it to stand in the garage all the time, so I got a permit for you too.’
His instinct was to tear the paper in half and it showed on his face.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Father, have you any idea what it’s like in Paris? The kind of people who’re still driving around in cars, well, they’re not the kind of people I want to be associated with. There’s still a war on, father, believe me!’
‘No, there’s an armistice on, you’d better believe me!’ snapped Léon Valois. ‘Face up to reality, even if you don’t like it. The facts are that the Germans are in control and likely to stay that way. With or without us, they’ll rule. Without us…well, I dread to think how it might be. With us, we can restrain, influence, perhaps eventually control! They’re a rigid race, good for soldiering, poor for politics. Believe me, Christian, my way’s the only way to build a future for France!’
He spoke with passionate sincerity but there was no place for them to meet. The one good thing about their quarrel was that it reunited him with his sister just as their row had temporarily brought him closer to his parents. She kissed him tenderly at parting and asked, ‘Is it really so awful under the Boche? I worry about you.’
‘Oh it’s not so bad really,’ he assured her.
‘No? Well, no matter what you say, one day I’ll surprise you and come and see for myself!’
She grinned in a most unseventeen-like way and hugged him once more with a childish lack of restraint before he got on the train.
He leaned out of the window and waved as long as he could see her on the platform. As he turned to sit down, the compartment door opened.
‘We meet again,’ said Delaplanche. ‘How was your trip? What did you think of Vichy?’
His eyes glanced at Madame Valois’s bagful of expensive cans, as if he were reading the labels through the cloth, and when they returned to Valois, he felt as if the man could see through to the car permit in his pocket.
‘I’ll tell you what I thought of Vichy,’ he said savagely.
Delaplanche listened in silence. Finished at last, Valois waited for approval.
‘I hope you’re not always so indiscreet,’ was all the lawyer said. ‘Especially with strangers.’
‘Strangers? But…’
‘What do you know of me?’
‘I know your reputation. I’ve read about, listened to you. I know you’re a man of the people, a socialist, some even say a…’
‘Communist? Yes, some do say that. Of course, if I were a communist, that would put me in the German camp, wouldn’t it?’
‘No! On the contrary…’
‘But Russia and Germany have a non-aggression pact.’
‘Yes, but that hardly means the communists support the Nazis!’
‘No. But wasn’t it enough to stop you from joining the communists just when you were teetering on the edge?’
The paper went up again. And the rest of the journey passed in silence, with the lawyer reading and Valois brooding on the man’s apparent detailed knowledge of his own background.
Their farewells in Paris were perfunctory. Valois felt tired yet restless. It had been an unsettling weekend and it was with a sense of relief and homecoming that he entered the apartment building. Perhaps his outrage at the idea of the car permit ought to extend to his use of his parents’ large well-appointed flat, but he was glad to find his mind could accommodate this as comfortably as it accommodated him.
The old lift had become an uncertain vehicle with lack of maintenance and power irregularities, so he headed for the staircase, ill-lit by a shrouded bulb to comply with the black-out regulations. The apartment was one floor up. He could hear a distant wireless playing music. It was a lively popular piece, but the distance, the hour and his own mood made it a melancholy sound. He sighed as he reached his landing.
Then fatigue and melancholy vanished in a trice, for terror lets no rival near the throne. There was a man crouched in the shadow of his door with a submachine gun under his arm. It was too late to retreat. The waiting man had seen him.
‘Monsieur Christian Valois?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve got a message for you.’
The man moved forward into the dim light. And the machine gun became a wooden crutch under his left arm. And the lurking assassin became a haggard, grey-haired man in a baggy suit.
‘A message? Who the hell from?’ demanded Valois, trying to cover his fear with aggression.
‘A friend,’ said the man. ‘Jean-Paul Simonian. Can we go inside? I’m dying of thirst!’
3
‘But he’s alive?’ demanded Janine for the sixth or seventh time.
‘Yes, yes, yes, how many times do I have to tell you!’ said Christian Valois with growing irritation. ‘He got shot in the head. He was critically ill for a long time but now he’s recovering. He’s in a military hospital near Nancy, but soon he’ll be shipped off to join the rest of them at some camp in Germany. But he is alive, he is all right.’
‘Why did he contact you, not me? Why didn’t he get in touch earlier? Why doesn’t he write instead of sending messages by this man Pivert?’
Janine knew how absurd all these questions must sound, but they forced themselves out against her will. The truth was, at first she didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it, when Valois, unnaturally flushed with suppressed excitement, had burst in, crying, ‘He’s alive! Jean-Paul’s alive!’ Finally, as details of the story began to adhere, there had started these other emotions, erupting like jets of steam from a hot spring, scalding, unforecastable, uncontrollable. Doubt was there, panic, fear, anger and plain resentment. Then the door opened and Pauli, attracted by the noise, rushed in crying, ‘Maman, what’s the matter? Are you ill?’
‘No, Pauli. It’s your father. He’s alive!’
For a moment the little boy stood perfectly still. Then he sat on the floor and began to cry, not the silent, half-concealed tears she had grown used to, but howling like his little sister.
‘Pauli!’ she said, kneeling beside him and hugging him close. ‘It’s all right, my love. It’s all right. Daddy’s alive!’
And suddenly it was all right. Her sobs joined the child’s and at last her emotions ran as clear as her joyful tears.
‘I’m sorry, Christian,’ she said a little later as they sat and drank a glass of wine. ‘I didn’t dare to believe you. Do you understand that? Now quickly, now I’m calm, before Sophie comes back from shopping, tell me it all again so I can break the news to her the best way possible.’
Corporal Major Pivert’s story had been told with an old soldier’s rough directness. He had been second in command of the section in which Jean-Paul was serving. They had held out for a day and a half against a ferocious onslaught.
‘Most of the Boche just went round us, leaving half a company to mop us up. Well, we showed the bastards! Mind you, we took a pounding. It brought us real close together. We’d been a tight-knit group before, got on well despite all our differences, but being under heavy attack together, losing some of your mates, that really binds you close as cement. It’s a grand feeling, but Christ, the pain of it, when another of your mates gets hit. You see, you’re all one. Every wound, every scream, every death, it’s yours. Do you see what I mean?’
Christian said, ‘I think so, I’m trying…’
The old soldier regarded him keenly and said, ‘You’ve had no service, have you, sir? You can’t understand without knowing it for yourself.’
Valois flushed and said, ‘Go on.’
‘It hit Simonian bad. His best mate, a young lad from Auxerre, died in his arms, spilling his guts all over him. I think he’d have gone over the top himself then, trying to take the bastards on single-handed, but the lieutenant stopped him. He was a good lad, that lieutenant. Fucking children they’re putting in charge now, I said when I first saw him. But he was all right.
‘Finally the lieutenant decided to call it a day. Our wireless had packed up, see, and for a long time we thought it was like the first war again, with us part of a long line running all the way from the sea to Switzerland. Little Verdun, that’s what I called the place we was. Except we found when we got the wireless going again, that just about every other bugger had packed up and gone home, or they were sitting on their arses waiting to be rounded up and trucked off east. Well, now the case was altered. Simonian was keen to go on fighting at first, but the lieutenant persuaded him for the sake of his mates to give it up. So we made a white flag, but before we shoved it up, the lieutenant said, “Hold on. Simonian, take this,” and he handed over the dead lad from Auxerre’s pass-book. “What for?” asks Simonian. “So you can chuck your own away,” says the lieutenant. “I was in Berlin before the war and I assure you that you’ll be better off not to have the name Iakov Moseich Simonian in your pass-book when the Boche get round to checking their prisoners.” “No,” says Simonian. “I’m not using these papers, I’m not having his parents told he’s alive and well and a prisoner when he’s lying dead and unburied out here.” “Please yourself,” says the lieutenant. “But let’s have a look at your own book then.” And he takes it and he scratches and tears it, then hands it back, looking right scruffy but no worse than many another after what we’d been through. “There,” he says. “You’ve been christened in every sense!” And I glanced at the book and saw that all that remained of his name was Jean-Paul Simon!
‘Now we waved the flag. The only trouble was that Fritz seemed to be a bit short-sighted. Or more like a bit short-tempered for all the bother we’d caused. So they just shot the flag to pieces and us with it. There were only four of us left alive and of these, only me and Simonian lasted long enough to get to hospital, me with one foot shot off and him with a bullet in his head.
‘And that was it, more or less. They were sawing bits off me for the next few months till they’d got as far as they could go. I didn’t even know Jean-Paul was still alive till a month or so back when I was getting around on my crutch and ran into him, so to speak, in a wheelchair. He didn’t seem to recognize me at first but when we got to talking, I could see it all gradually coming back to him. The thing was, he was still down in the books as Jean-Paul Simon. I asked one of the nurses about him. She said it was sad, he never said anything about his past life and there didn’t seem to be any next of kin to inform. At least he was getting better, though he’d been very ill. Well, I guessed that he was just playing dumb because, having changed his name, he could hardly start talking about a family called Simonian, could he? And from what I heard people saying, the lieutenant had been right. Iakov Moseich was not a good label to wear in the heart of Bocheland, which is where he’ll likely end up.
‘Me, well, there was no use sending a one-legged man to a POW camp, even the Boche could see that. So they decided to discharge me back home. When I told Jean-Paul, he asked me to get in touch with you, Monsieur Valois, and tell you he was alive and well. He didn’t want to risk putting anything down on paper in case I got searched. So here I am and that’s my message!’
‘By the time he finished it was nearly curfew or I’d have come round last night,’ concluded Valois. ‘He slept in the flat and this morning I sent him off with some money.’
‘Did you get his address? Can I talk to him?’ demanded Janine.
‘Of course,’ said Valois. ‘Though not straightaway, eh? I’ll fix it up later. There’s still a slight risk now, and it’s best not to take chances.’
This wasn’t the real reason, but Janine in her joy and excitement was easily persuaded to accept it. The truth was that Valois had other cause to feel uneasy about a meeting between Pivert and Janine. He’d censored all references to the mental scarring left by Jean-Paul’s wound.
‘I knew he was married with kiddies,’ Pivert had said. ‘You talk about these things when you’re under fire like we’d been. But first time I mentioned them in the hospital, he just looked blank. Another time he talked about them, but like he was talking about something in a dream. Most of the time he just wanted to talk about our old comrades. I had to go through how each of them died, he was so desperate to believe that some others might have survived.
‘But you he seemed to remember all the time, sir. You and his old mother. He said to contact you first so you could break it to the old lady. Good news can sometimes shock even more than bad, can’t it?’
Good news so mixed with cause for unease certainly could, decided Valois. And he had taken it upon himself to convey only the joyous essentials of the tale to Janine and his reward was to see her face light up like a spring dawn.
When Sophie returned from shopping, complaining bitterly about the lack of most things and the price of the rest, Valois diplomatically withdrew. They needn’t have worried, however. She short-circuited Janine’s tentative approach to the subject with a crisp, ‘What’s this? You’ve got news of Jean-Paul, haven’t you? Well, praise be to God, he’s alive!’
‘Bubbah! How did you know?’ demanded Janine amazed.
‘Know? I’ve always known! And how did I know you were going to tell me? Well, I’ve not seen your eyes sparkle like that for over a year, so I didn’t think you were going to tell me he was dead! Come here, child!’
Laughing and crying together, Janine fell into the old woman’s arms.
After joy came decision. Day to day existence had gone out of the window. There was now a future to be planned.
Janine wanted to sit down and write a long loving letter to Jean-Paul straightaway and once more found herself at odds with Christian.
‘You can’t just write,’ he said. ‘Letters are censored. I don’t know how much danger Jean-Paul would be in if they discovered his background, but they’d certainly sit up and take notice if they did find out he’d been misleading them about his name. So it can’t help him if suddenly out of the blue he starts getting letters from his family, can it?’
To Janine’s surprise and disappointment, Sophie supported Valois. ‘There are stories told in the schul of what these Nazis have done in Germany. If my son is soon to go into one of these prisoner camps, better he go as Jean-Paul Simon, Catholic, I think.’
‘But we have to let him know that we’re all well, Bubbah, you, me and the children!’ cried Janine. ‘And if we don’t contact him straightaway, how will we ever know where they send him? Oh, don’t let’s lose him again so soon after finding him! Couldn’t I travel to Nancy to see him? Christian, couldn’t your father help me to get an Ausweis?’
Valois shook his head in exasperation.
