A Lesser Evil (43 page)

Yvette was already very cold, the light was fading, and the prospect of yet another interminable night plagued with hunger pains, tantalizing visions of food and her limbs aching from scrunching them up to keep warm, was daunting. Telling Fifi about her demons might distract them both for a while, and maybe it might help the girl to see that the world wasn’t the bright, beautiful place she believed it to be, and there couldn’t always be a happy ending.

‘I’ve kept my secrets for a long, long time,’ Yvette warned Fifi as she lay down and cuddled close to her. ‘It will be’ard for me to tell you them, but you tell me all about you, and maybe you should know me too.’

Yvette began with how it was for her as a child, the father she never knew, the tiny apartment in rue du Jardin, and her mother constantly sewing.

‘We were very poor,’ Yvette said. ‘Sometimes when Mama’s ladies didn’t pay her, we were hungry, but we had very happy times too. Mama used to like me to read to her while she sewed, and I make dresses for my doll from ze scraps of ze fine fabrics left over. On summer nights when it began to get dark and she couldn’t sew any more, we would go out for walks down by ze Seine and watch the boats going past. We peep in the windows of the big houses, and stop outside grand restaurants to hear ze music. Mama always say she missed me when I was at school, but she was very proud because I was clever, always top of my class, she hoped that I would be able to get a good job and not have to work hard like she did.’

Yvette found herself slipping back to September of 1939 when she was twelve. She could see herself coming home from school with her friend Françoise, both skinny girls with olive skin, dark hair and eyes. They wore black wool stockings that slipped down in folds over their ankles, and their long plaits bounced and swung as they hopped over cracks in the pavements. People always thought they were twins because they were so similar, but Yvette thought Françoise was the prettier; she had dimples in her cheeks and perfect Cupid’s bow lips.

At school their teacher kept talking about the war which had just begun, pinning up maps to show how the Germans were advancing through Poland, but it meant little to Yvette and Françoise, for Poland was so far away from Paris and neither of them had a father who would have to go and fight.

What Yvette remembered most about that time was the food in the shops and the smells that went with it. Perhaps it only stuck in her memory because that was the last time for many years she would see such abundance. Rosy polished apples piled high, luscious purple grapes spilling out of boxes, peaches, carrots and vivid red tomatoes. Freshly baked bread and croissants, the marble counter at the charcuterie laden with dozens of different cheeses, ham and paâté. And so many autumn flowers too, tin buckets crammed with chrysanthemums, dahlias and purple daisies.

‘It was Françoise who first told me that ze Nazis didn’t like Jews,’ Yvette went on. ‘She ’ad relatives in Berlin, and they’d written to her mother to say they were trying to get away as Jews were being attacked and their businesses confiscated. But Francçoise and me, we didn’t really see ourselves as Jews, our mothers didn’t go to the synagogue and they didn’t keep up any of the traditions. To us we were just French, and whatever was happening in Germany had nothing to do with us.

‘But by ze spring of 1940 I could see Mama was worried about something more than paying ze rent and whether ze war would stop her ladies having new clothes made. One day I ask her about it and she told me she was afraid for us.’

Yvette could remember having conflicting feelings as the Germans advanced closer and closer to France. There was a kind of raw excitement in the air, so many men in uniform milling around Paris, tales of heroism bandied around on street corners. To her and Francçoise it was something like waiting for Christmas, so much anticipation and hope, yet because both their mothers were poor, there was also a faint dread as they were used to disappointment.

The casualties of war were already mounting, and the oldest people kept on recounting stories of the young men in their families who had died in the trenches of the First War. People married in haste without any of the customary ceremony and tradition. Young women who until then had been models of decorum were seen kissing young men passionately in public. The bars, nightclubs and restaurants all grew busier and noisier. Churches were packed on Sundays, and people stayed out on the streets as the days lengthened; maybe it was only to discuss the war or gossip, but to the two young girls Paris had an almost carnival atmosphere.

Sometimes Yvette and Francçoise would go to the Gare du Nord to watch troops leaving on the trains. They were too young to fully understand the tears of sweethearts as they clung together, but old enough to want this heady drama for themselves. They threw flowers and waved hand-kerchiefs too. They even hoped that the war wouldn’t end before they were adult enough to have someone to kiss goodbye.

But behind all this frantic activity throughout Paris, there was also a swell of anxiety and unease which grew steadily stronger through April and May. The teachers at school had very grave faces, and they seemed disinclined to show the Germans’ advance through Holland and Belgium on their maps any longer.

Then at the end of May the whole of Paris was aghast as French and English troops retreated to Dunkirk. Church bells tolled and people flocked to pray that their menfolk were amongst those who were rescued from the beaches.

While everyone was still reeling from this disaster, the Germans were moving towards Paris. On 10 June the French government abandoned the capital because it could not be defended. While most citizens were glad their beloved Paris was saved from the destruction of siege and street fighting, they were still shocked and horrified to see the first advance units of German soldiers arrive in the city.

Yvette and Francçoise slipped away to see the German horse artillery pass through the Arc de Triomphe, and all at once they understood the reality of war as they saw the cold, stern faces beneath helmets, and the long trail of horse-drawn gun carriages. Within hours Paris was fully occupied, and although France didn’t surrender until 22 June, for Yvette, the day the first Germans arrived was the start of her war. She experienced her first real pang of fear, a foreboding that nothing would ever be the same again. Much later she was to see that day as the last of her childhood.

‘You’ve made me see it all,’ Fifi murmured against Yvette’s shoulder. It was dark now, and she could no longer see her friend’s face. ‘But go on; did the Nazis come for you and your mother straight away?’

‘No. But it was very frightening for everyone, Jews and gentiles. People were shot if they were caught in ze streets after curfew. The Germans walked into shops and demanded ze best produce, often refusing to pay for it. They would close businesses down, break windows, and often confiscated property. Just looking at them too boldly was enough to get punched or kicked.

‘Mama said we must stay indoors and only go out to get food. But each day it grew harder to find any, sometimes we had to go a long way just for a loaf of bread, and the German soldiers were everywhere. We tried so hard not to be noticed, for they would call for you to stop and demand to look at our papers. Mama would slip out sometimes to talk to people she knew. I think now she must get word how bad it was for Jews in Poland, back in Germany and in Holland. But she say little to me, only that she must get me away somewhere safe.

‘When Francçoise was sent away, I was jealous,’ Yvette admitted. ‘She had an aunt somewhere in the south to go to. I was lonely without her. Then a few weeks later Mama tells me I must go too.’

Fifi heard the catch in her friend’s voice, and stroked her cheek to encourage her to carry on.

‘You know, I can still see ze apartment, Mama’s face, everything, just as if it were only yesterday, not twenty-three years ago.’ Yvette sighed. ‘But maybe that is because my leaving was so sudden.’

She closed her eyes as she remembered the last hours in the apartment, and she could see herself climbing the stairs, puffed from running home from school in the rain.

The staircase was stone, with rusting fancy ironwork banisters, and wound around the centre of the building. The only light came from a skylight up on the fourth floor, and from the front door when it was left open.

All the smells from the other apartments, and there were four on each floor, stayed trapped in the building in summer, a pungent warm soup of garlic, cheese, herbs, laundry soap and sometimes drains. Madame Chevioux, the widow who lived on the ground floor at the front, had the biggest apartment, and she lorded it over the other tenants because she was a relative of the landlord and collected the rents.

The tenants came and went frequently because of Madame Chevioux, but Yvette and her mother had lived up at the very top in the attic rooms since Yvette was just a baby. Mama smiled sweetly at the bully on the ground floor. She scrubbed the stairs all the way down every week, cleaned the bathroom on each floor, and occasionally made Madame a skirt or a blouse for nothing, just to ensure she wouldn’t be evicted. Yvette had been warned a hundred times or more that she was never to be cheeky or rude to the woman, for cheap apartments were hard to get.

That day, as Yvette opened the door to the apartment, Mama looked round from folding some clothes on the table.

‘I have some good news for you,’ she said.

Mama was tiny; even at thirteen Yvette was a little taller than her. Francçoise had once remarked that she looked faded, though until then Yvette hadn’t noticed. But she was right; Mama had faded from the raven-haired, curvaceous beauty with doe-like eyes that Yvette admired in the photograph on the dresser. Now, her slender shoulders were rounded through bending over her sewing-machine, and her hair was more grey than raven. Even her eyes had faded; they appeared to have a milky film on them the way chocolate went if it was kept too long. She was thirty-five, which seemed very old to Yvette, and her face, though not lined yet, had a yellowish tinge.

‘We’re going somewhere!’ Yvette exclaimed joyfully, for along with the clothes on the table was a canvas bag.

‘Only you, my darling,’ Mama said. ‘I have found some-where safe for you, until the Germans are gone.’

‘But I can’t go anywhere without you,’ Yvette replied, the pleasure of a trip vanishing all at once. ‘Why can’t you come too?’

‘Because you will be safer without me, and I have my living here.’

Mama didn’t often speak in that firm tone, but when she did Yvette knew she mustn’t argue.

‘Where am I going?’ she asked.

‘To a country town. You will get plenty of food and fresh air, and it will be a good life. I will come for you as soon as I can.’

‘Am I going soon?’ Yvette asked.

‘In a couple of hours,’ Mama said. ‘We will walk down to the market and you will be picked up there. I do not want Madame Chevioux to know you are going anywhere. I do not trust her.’

Yvette paused in her story, and Fifi realized she was crying silently.

‘Was that the last time you saw your mother?’

‘Yes,’ Yvette said, her voice gruff with emotion. ‘Yet I think in my heart I knew I was never going to see her or ze apartment again, for as I ate some bread and cheese and drank some milk, I seemed to soak up everything about them.

‘I can see it so clearly still, the wood floor Mama paint with the varnish, the rag rugs she sew, and her old sewing-machine. Only one big room really, we ’ave a bed behind some curtains, and the table was huge so Mama could cut out her dresses. We ’ave a kind of sideboard under ze window; a big cushion on the top to make it like a window seat. When it was sunny I’d lie on it basking like a cat. I used to watch ze people in the street below too, and look out over ze rooftops to the dome of ze Sacré Coeur. Maybe ze apartment very shabby, but I never think of it that way.’

After a while Yvette continued, telling Fifi she and her mama were duly met in the market by Madame and Monsieur Richelieu. They seemed warm, charming people, a little older than her mama, and they said they were going to tell people Yvette was their orphaned niece. They lived in Tours where they had a boulangerie, and Yvette could help them in the bakehouse. They also promised they were going to continue with her education, and that by the time the war was over she’d be able to return to Paris to go to the university.

‘I feel no suspicion about them,’ Yvette said. ‘I like them, so did Mama. They said it was best we didn’t write letters to one another, at least for ze time being, in case they were intercepted. But Mama had ze address where I was going, so that didn’t alarm me.’

‘Don’t tell me they were rotters!’

‘They were. The worst and wickedest kind, for they duped Mama. But at first it was just like they say. We took the train to Tours; the papers they ’ad for me were checked and accepted. There was ze boulangerie, in ze centre of ze town, and I ’ad a little room next to theirs in their apartment over ze shop. Tante Grace, as she said I was to call her, fed me well, didn’t work me too hard, and though I wasn’t allowed out alone, I thought that was to keep me safe.

‘But then one night about three months later, I was taken away by car. They must have drugged me for I remember nothing after eating my supper, and then ze motion of a vehicle. When I woke up I was in a room with bars at ze windows, and a woman came in to tell me that from now on I was her property.’

‘What was this place?’ Fifi asked. She had long since forgotten her hunger, the dark and the cold as Yvette took her back to France with her.

‘A brothel,’ Yvette almost spat out. ‘Not that I even knew that word then, or what went on in them. I hadn’t even started to menstruate or grow breasts. I knew nothing about the adult world. Just thirteen, a child still.’

Fifi gasped.

‘I was made to bathe and wash my hair, and then I was given a nightdress to put on. I kept asking where Tante Grace was, and crying, but this woman she didn’t even tell me ’er name, she slapped me, she say I am to do exactly what she tells me or be punished.’