The Girl in the Blue Beret (12 page)

She brought him a jug of warm water, a razor, and a sliver of soap. Later in the day she brought him newspapers and books and kept him company while he ate bread and cheese.

“I will teach you my language, a little.
Un peu.
”

“I know a little.”

“Say
‘s’il vous plaît.’
Please.”

“
S’il vous plaît
. I know that much.
Merci
. I know that.”

His college French had been in books. Pronunciation was guesswork.

“Say my name. Jeannine.
Jan-neen.
”

“Jan-neen.”

She offered him a French grammar book, and the next time she came, he had reviewed the verb forms. He heard her doing the barnyard chores, feeding the hens and ducks. Her sister cooked him a duck egg, which was delicious. Years after the war, he asked Loretta why she never bought duck eggs. Why always hen eggs? She laughed so loudly. “I never heard of people eating duck eggs,” she said.

HE SPENT THREE DAYS
in the barn studying French vocabulary.
La table, la fenêtre, le canard
. Table, window, duck. Sometimes the words in the lessons were sad. Teapot. Fireplace. Pillow. Tender words that could spontaneously pierce his heart like shrapnel.
Jeune fille. Bébé
.

“My son is in Germany,” she said. “Say
la guerre.
”

“La guerre.”

She lowered her eyes. “The boys cannot fight the war,” she said. “They are in the work camps.”

She did not ask about his life in the States or about his plane crash. She brought him a piece of bread fresh from her oven. She had hoarded some flour for special occasions. He savored the bread, its chewiness a challenge.

He rested in the nest of hay. Outside a goose honked. He watched dust motes in the crack of light across the dirt floor; in them he imagined he could see swarms of aircraft. In the night he heard RAF bombers, and soon after daybreak he heard a lone B-17. The familiar sound was unmistakable. He tried to see through the cracks in the barn walls. He couldn’t spot it, and the sound faded. It was another straggler, another crew in trouble. He fantasized being rescued by it. He listened for a crash, but he heard nothing, and he did not mention it to Jeannine.

On the third night his interrogator reappeared.

“We checked you thoroughly with the English authorities, and you are Marshall Stone, of the 303rd Bomb Group. I am happy to say that we will help you get back to your base in England.”

“Excellent. Thank you.” Marshall was elated. The coil inside him began to unwind. “Can I get over the mountains to Spain?”

“I do not know the next stage. I know only one stage.” The man handed Marshall the dog tag. It was still warm from the man’s trouser pocket. Marshall held it tightly in his hand, as if it were a good luck charm and he suddenly believed in magic.

The man said, “Tomorrow you will be driven to a safe house.”

A WOMAN WAS HURRYING
up a winding stair. The cramped house had uneven floorboards, perhaps centuries old, with a threadbare carpet. He could see her hand at her bosom, holding her dark shawl tightly together, her black scarf tied beneath her chin. She came swiftly up the stairs, signaling for him to retreat from his room into the hiding closet. Grabbing his bedding, he crawled into the dark, hidden recess, and she pushed a chest in front of the small, low door. Dogs were barking on the street. Several heavy vehicles drove by. After a while, she mounted the stairs again and moved the furniture aside, releasing him.

The room contained one bed. Marshall was shut away like an attic child with nothing to do. On the walls were a crucifix, a picture of the Madonna and child, a pastel landscape of something that looked like misty mountains, and a photograph of a young man in a double-breasted suit. There was no chair, only the chest, the narrow bed, and a tiny mat on the floor. Each morning he heard a certain whistling from the street. Was someone so happy, or was it a signal?

The first morning, a shy adolescent girl brought him down the stairs into the kitchen, where four women in black garb were bent over large wooden bowls. He imagined they were widows or mothers from the first war, women aging with painful memories of young men. The women were working with cheese. The woman who had shown him upstairs the previous evening rose from her work and poured him a cup of coffee from a pot on the wood-stove. The small cup was fiercely hot, and the ersatz coffee was bitter and strong. She did not offer milk or sugar. Through the window he saw a tan mutt, its ears alert, facing the street.

Behind Marshall a low murmur of voices rose as the women resumed their tasks. The tallest of the women spoke to him, and from a cupboard she removed a piece of hard bread and gave it to him. She seemed to be apologizing for the lack of butter.

A heavily dressed man opened the door, and the tan mutt rushed in with him and a woman dressed in pale green. A babble of energetic French followed, and Marshall sensed seriousness but not immediate danger. The man left then, with the dog.

After he ate the bread, Marshall was shown where to empty his chamber pot. The woman in green dipped hot water from a cauldron on the stove into a handled jug, and she gave him something like a dishcloth that he understood to be a bathing towel. There was soap and a razor in the room upstairs. He took the jug and the towel upstairs and gave himself a spit bath. Later he brought down the chamber pot and emptied it. The women looked up from their work, stared at him as he passed through, then bent their heads again.

Marshall had nothing to make the hours pass. Over and over the plane slid into the field. Over and over he ran through the woods, smelling the smoke from the plane. He couldn’t remember when he knew he was afraid. He thought he was more afraid now, looking back.

The red-cheeked boy, dressed in brown baggy pants and a cap. The cigarette. Webb and Hootie lying on the ground. The plane burning.

Everything Marshall owned now was in his pockets. There was the yellow card with a few French phrases to use in case he was shot down in France. The silk map, the first-aid items, the tube of condensed milk. Because he wasn’t supposed to be caught with the map, he worked at memorizing it. It was so intricate, the print so small. He needed better lighting. He sat on the floor against the wall, staring at the blue floral bouquets of the wallpaper. He tried to focus his mind by counting the bouquets.

He heard shouts in the street. He heard a horse clopping along, dragging a cart of some sort. Through the tiny window he could see an arc of the street and a wedge of open field. He could see the traffic pass. Occasionally he saw a group of children walking by. Their spontaneous giggles and laughter charged him with a bit of hope.

IN THE EVENING
the women closed the shutters and drew the dark drapes to conceal the candlelight of the kitchen. He was brought downstairs to share a rabbit stew with the eight family members—the four older women, two young girls, and their parents. Reticent, Marshall observed them. His knowledge of French collapsed under the rush of their conversation. He learned to interpret tones if not their run-together words. He saw their skeptical looks, the gestures they made over their food. He could tell when they were talking about the Germans. The Germans apparently took the family’s goose for their Christmas. The Germans gorged on chocolate! Chickens! Butter!

The women in black had an authority that made the girls and their mother cower. There were no young men. The women barely spoke to Marshall, but when he tried to draw them out with his makeshift vocabulary, they modestly but eagerly queried him about America.

“FDR? Connaissez-vous FDR?”

“Shirley Temple?”

No one in the family revealed their names except for the man, Reynard. He was short and slender, with knobby hands. He pulled a leather wallet from his pocket and showed Marshall his identity papers. He pointed to his photograph, his name, his occupation, his citizenship. He flipped through the papers quickly.

“À Paris,”
Reynard said. “In Paris you will obtain the
fausse carte d’identité
.”

“À Paris,”
they all said, nodding in assent.

They were saying he would need a false ID card.

Every evening he heard German soldiers marching through the village on night patrol, singing a mournful song that sounded like homesickness itself. Warmth from the evening fire drifted up the open stairway door to his garret. He crept out and sat on the stair.

Sometimes he heard the Luftwaffe overhead, a nasty roar that he could feel in the pit of his stomach.

At night the face in the cockpit of a Focke-Wulf 190 visited him, a fighter pilot who had suddenly, briefly, flown alongside the stricken
Dirty Lily
. Their planes were so close, like cars on a street.

He replayed his mission, instant by instant. He didn’t want to forget it, but neither did he want to relive its most terrible moments. He was heartsick; he didn’t know the fate of the crew. They had lost the plane.

He had been in England kissing Nurse Begley, and suddenly here he was in a claustrophobic hidey-hole, waiting, waiting, in a house of strangers jabbering gibberish, women in shapeless black garments plodding through their days worrying with food, fragments of food, roots from a cellar. He was a helpless pipsqueak. When he went down to empty his chamber pot one morning, he saw the girls’ mother come in from the garden with a green leaf. She waved it in his face and chattered excitedly.

France didn’t seem as cold as New Jersey, from what he could gauge by the quality of the unheated air, the chill in the house.

He heard voices downstairs during the night, and footsteps ascending the stairs.
“Monsieur, monsieur, des Américains! Américains! Aviateurs!”

He opened the door and there stood two men—disheveled, large, haggard, sleepy-looking.

“Des aviateurs!”
one of the women in black—the tallest—said. She was carrying a small candle.

“We were shot down,” the taller one said sheepishly.

“You
suis américain
too?” Marshall asked, startled.

“Yeah boy!” said the other. “I’ve been on the run, like a wild pig rooting around in the woods. Four days. Then I met some friendly guys who took me to a farmhouse and I got grub, and next thing you know I met Pete and they brought us both here.”

“Pete Drummond, 403rd,” the tall one said. “Waist gunner. Our Fort got hit on the way back from Frankfurt, and I bailed out. Let me tell you, that was some ride.”

The woman left, and for a time the flyers filled the room with their stories. Marshall was glad to hear English. Probably one of these flyers was from the Fort he had heard flying low a few days earlier. The guys gabbed until another of the women climbed up to their hideaway.

“Chut!”
she said, entering the room with a tray. “Hush.”

She had brought them each a cup of ale and some pieces of bread.

“Man, this cock-sucker French bread is liable to tear out all my fillings,” said Pete.

The other flyer, Nelson Avery, a tail gunner from the 305th, gnawed his bread steadily. “Excuse me, I’m still starving.” He licked the crumbs from his hand. “I don’t know what happened to our plane, our crew. I got out, but it was on fire and I reckon they’re all goners.”

He spoke as if he were talking about a distant event that did not concern himself. His emotions hadn’t registered yet, Marshall thought. Nor had his own. He didn’t know where he was or what he was supposed to feel. It was some small comfort to have two more flyers there with a language in common, but they also intruded on what had been his private garret.

“Where’s your flight suit?” he asked Pete, who was dressed like a laborer.

“I robbed a scarecrow.”

The pants were filthy and ragged, too short, and the sleeves of the jacket rode up his arms, exposing his GI wristwatch.

Marshall joked, “Next time, I’m going to pack a sandwich and a French peasant outfit.”

“Always be prepared, huh?” said Nelson. “Well, the Boy Scouts don’t teach you how to bail out of a blazing bomber.”

“I got the piss knocked out of me when I landed,” Pete said. “When you hit the silk there are two big spurts. First, you’re out the door, WHOOM! Then WHAM! The chute opens. Then you’re falling, like your ears have gone deaf. Or you’re in heaven. Then WHAM-BAM! You hit the ground.”

“It’s so peaceful till you hit,” Nelson said.

Hearing about their flakked and burning bombers and their heavenly parachute descents intrigued Marshall. He almost envied them. They could just float down to the ground, and then they were on their own. They didn’t have to see their crewmates lying dead. He shivered. The
Dirty Lily
slammed into the ground again.

“What do you think comes next?” Nelson asked Marshall. “Is the Underground going to get us out?”

“You never know who might be friendly or not,” said Pete. “I tried to ask a man on a bicycle for directions, and he just kept going. He muttered some frog grunt I couldn’t understand, but you could tell he didn’t want to be bothered.”

“They’re afraid,” Marshall said. He sipped his ale, trying to make it last.

“But this family is going to help us.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Three days. Every day they say I’m going.”

“I think the invasion is coming any day,” Nelson said. “I kept hearing that on base.”

A step on the stairs. The signal Marshall had learned, the
chut!
sound and
Allo Allo
.

The woman had brought two blankets. Pete thanked her.
“Merci,”
he knew to say.

“Mercy bucketsful,” said Nelson, grinning as he took the blankets.

Marshall understood from the woman’s gestures that Pete and Nelson would have to sleep in the hiding closet, to stay concealed. He helped her move the chest away from the small door. There was some bedding inside.

“Both of us, in there?” Pete said. He and Nelson laughed.

Marshall tried to make them understand the seriousness of the house rules.