The Girl in the Blue Beret (41 page)

“Did you name your son for Georges Broussine?”

“Bien sûr.”

“Does your son know?”

“Oh, yes. However, I think the original Georges may be a little embarrassed.”

“A modest man, you say.”

“Yes.” She laid her hand on his knee.

“I named my son Albert,” he said. “After the family that helped me in Chauny.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“The name means ‘courage.’ ”

The waning moon resembled a hat hanging in the sky. He pointed it out to her.

“A beret,” she said.

“Aren’t you glad I bought this chic headgear from the stall on the rue de Rivoli?”

“Yes. My beret is warm,” she said.

“It feels strange to be in the Pyrenees again,” he said after a moment. The rocky peaks were out there, somewhere in the dark.

“Tell me about the time before,” she said. “I know it has been on your mind.”

He stared into the darkness, toward Spain.

“What are you seeing?” she asked. “I would like to know.”

A meteor dashed silently across the sky then.

58.

M
ARSHALL GAZED AT THE SKY AS HE BEGAN TO SPEAK
.

“When I crossed the Pyrenees in ’44, I thought if I could just get to the summit, it would be like flying. To get back to my base, I was prepared to face whatever dangers lay ahead. The train was the first hurdle. I think Robert was my guide on the train.”

“Yes. After Perpignan, he had begun making journeys to Pau.”

“And there was a girl, a girl with blond pigtails.”

“I think that was my friend Hélène. She was two years older than me, and she had an aunt in Montauban, so she could travel on the pretext that her aunt was sick. Her parents didn’t know she was
résistante
!”

“The night train to Toulouse was miserably slow. The tracks had been sabotaged in several places. Now and then the train jolted on a bad roadbed, and sometimes we stopped for a long time. It was hard to stay awake. I had to be fully alert, but I was dead tired and miserable. It was dark and the windows were covered, so we couldn’t see the terrain. I carried a newspaper—the one your mother had pressed into my knapsack before I left to meet you.”

“At the Jardin des Plantes.”

“Yes. I went there last week. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Oui, oui.”

“In the daylight on the train I kept reading the newspaper, and I tried to play ‘deaf and dumb.’ I had to make sure I was never startled by a noise. It was a useful discipline. People now are going to meditation classes to learn how to be mellow.” He laughed. “By noon I had learned all the French in the collaborationist news, but my companions in the compartment probably thought I was an exceptionally slow reader. No one really spoke. Under German eyes, everyone kept to himself. No one wanted to speak or even offer common courtesies to the enemy. I have to admit I was terrified. Any minute and their pistols could be at my head. Your mother had made my hair dark, and I hunched down to conceal my height. But one thing I hadn’t thought of. When I went to the lavatory, the floor inside was wet, and I made boot prints down the aisle when I walked back to my seat. After I turned to open the door of my compartment, I faced the other way and I saw my footprints—a trail of little USA insignias, written backwards! The letters ‘USA’ were in the rubber on the heels of my boots. I must have turned red as a cherry at the sight of that. I retraced my path, sliding my feet to blur the prints. The next time I went to the lavatory, I dried my boots off before leaving.”

He laughed, telling this, and she laughed with him.

“Your calling card,” she said.

“It’s funny now, but the whole trip was nerve-wracking. I almost had a heart attack when I saw that incriminating trail. I was with three other airmen, and two of them were in different cars. Robert was at the head of my car. He was reading a book and paying no attention to me. Our group got off at Montauban, and the girl guided us to a park.”

“I’m sure that was Hélène.”

“In the park we could scatter out and pass the time for a while. Then, I think to confuse the Germans, she took us on by bus to Toulouse. Robert didn’t go to the park, and I lost sight of him. But there he was on the quai at Toulouse. The train to Pau was due in just a few minutes. Robert went to the lavatory, and the girl was reading a book on a bench. The train was late. That was a miserable hour! We couldn’t talk, couldn’t buy anything to eat or a newspaper, for fear of betraying ourselves. We all sat on various benches, checking the departure board from time to time. I concentrated on not hearing a train approaching. I wondered just how deaf I was supposed to be. Would I hear the vibrations of the train when it was still far away? Was I totally deaf or partially deaf? Why didn’t I know sign language? And would that be the same in French? I was crazed with all these questions.”

“All the Allied
aviateurs
who fell into France were deaf and dumb,” she said, laughing. They laughed together. He had not imagined his tale would be so entertaining. She said, “The flu epidemic of 1917 left many people deaf and dumb, so it was plausible.”

“Still, the Germans must have been stupid not to notice,” he said. “The French would have noticed us, wouldn’t they?”

“Oh, they did. And no one denounced you! This was the passive
résistance
of the French! They say most people collaborated, but this was an example of how we resisted when there seemed to be nothing one could do. The Americans were obvious—and everyone knew! We kept quiet. Oh, excuse me, I’ve launched into my opinions. Continue, please!” She hugged his arm.

“I had eaten most of the food your mother gave me. I tried to eat my orange the way a French workman would. Anyway, an orange was messy enough to keep people at arm’s length. Two of the men in our group—I didn’t know them at all—were behaving rather strangely, talking to each other. Although I wasn’t seated near them, I was determined to have nothing to do with them. They were going to jeopardize the whole operation. One of them went to the kiosk and bought something to eat, and he started toward me signaling that he wanted to give me some of it. I stood up, turned, and walked away. The fool. I was afraid we were going to attract the attention of the German officer who was standing at the exit to the street, checking papers. In the lulls between trains, he strolled around, gave everybody the once-over, and entertained himself by throwing pebbles at pigeons. Then a new set of guards arrived and they
heil
-Hitlered each other with great fanfare. I imagined them practicing that in front of the mirror. I thought about Hitler looking in the mirror and wondered what he saw.

“Robert returned and we all boarded the train to Pau. We got there uneventfully. The Germans at the checkpoint glanced at my papers without asking any questions. I thought they probably couldn’t read French anyway, so the papers you and your mother had created worked just fine, I am happy to tell you.”

“Maman filled them in with her left hand. She insisted on that method of disguising handwriting.”

“It worked, and I was thankful to the bottom of my boots. I had been chiding myself for not taking a knife to those USA initials on the boots. How could I have been so careless? By the time we arrived at Pau it was the middle of the night, and Robert passed us off to a man and woman who drove us to a safe house, where there were some other airmen sheltered. We were given cheese and some kind of bread and soup. But here was the biggest surprise of all. I was totally unprepared for this. You remember that I told you about the crew of our plane. The pilot—Lawrence Webb—died at the scene, I was sure. And there was another guy, a waist gunner called Hootie Williams. I thought he was hurt pretty badly, and I didn’t know if he was captured. I was almost certain he had died. He looked bad. All during my trip through France I was nagged by thoughts of Hootie and what happened to him. Well, believe it or not, there was Hootie! In this house, sitting at the table eating soup. I can’t tell you the greeting we gave each other.

“He was calm, though. He said, ‘Hey, Marshall, what took you so long? I’ve been waiting on you!’

“I was astounded. And thrilled. You can’t know.

“ ‘Well, Hootie,’ I said. ‘I always said you were the smartest one of us all. I should have known you would find your way.’

“Hootie told me that Webb was dead and had been buried in that little village in Belgium. And he said three of the crew had been arrested.”

Marshall paused, remembering how Hootie, his mouth stuffed with chewy bread, had praised him for the landing. Hootie hadn’t bailed out, as Chick Cochran did.
Oh, no, Marshall. I knew Webb was a goner. When he said “bail out,” I knew we were too low. But Chick jumped anyway. The dope
. Hootie shook his head and grinned like a hyena.

“Many
aviateurs
became separated when they were shot down,” Annette was saying. “Then at the safe houses they might find each other again, or receive some news. Sometimes there were long waits.”

“We didn’t know at the time that everybody else from our crew had survived and would eventually make it home.” Marshall laughed. “Hootie told a tale about a woman who guided him on a train, and when the German officers were approaching, this anonymous woman pulled him into a headlock and kissed him, smothering his face with her hair. She figured the Germans wouldn’t break up a pair of lovers, I guess. I didn’t know whether to believe him, but Hootie said, ‘Marshall, that kiss couldn’t be repeated in heaven! I never found out who she was. She got me to where we were going and then she took a run-out powder.’ ”

“That was a strategy,” Annette said. “Robert and I played sweethearts, so no one would suspect—”

“Hootie stayed with a family in Belgium who kept him out of the hospital where the Germans would have found him. He had been wounded, but not seriously, as I had thought. He was soon on his feet. While he was with the Belgian family, he started helping the Resistance! He worked with the explosives.

“Hootie told me the family was named Lechat. I did not run across that name again until this spring when I went back to the crash site. And, Annette, the people told me that a boy’s father was shot for convoying one of our crew. It was Monsieur Lechat. He paid with his life for taking care of Hootie.”

Marshall paused, recalling Hootie’s crazy laugh. “I didn’t know this until I went back to Belgium this spring.”

“These are difficult recognitions,” she said, leaning on his shoulder. “Go on. It is hard,
n’est-ce pas
? I am listening.”

“Hootie had gotten word that Campanello, our navigator, was one of those who went to the stalag. We weren’t too worried about POWs because of the Geneva convention. We didn’t know that the Germans were starting to get a little loose on that point and were sending some POWs to Buchenwald. I only heard about this years later.”

“Yes,” Annette said. “That was so.”

“Hootie had made his way through France by taking chances and pulling his wheeler-dealer ways. He was charming that way. He was the biggest daredevil I ever knew. He claimed he never went hungry in France.

“The next afternoon four of us were picked up in a dilapidated truck and driven through miles of foothills. We were let out at the end of a farm and told to walk down a stony path through some trees. We were off the road, so we were relatively safe. There was a French guide with us who would bring up the rear and be the translator. I don’t remember that he had much to say, though.

“It was growing dark, and the trail started to get twisty, so we were glad when we met the guide who would lead us across. He was a Basque who knew only a few English words and apparently had little interest in anything except getting us to follow him at breakneck speed in total silence. He had some rope sandals for us, some clumsy strung-together things that I refused to wear. First, he demanded it; then he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘It’s your funeral.’ ”

“Espadrilles,” she said.

“I called them Basket shoes. The other guys took them because their shoes weren’t so great, but I wouldn’t part with my USA boots. The night before, I had gouged out the letters with my knife.

“We carried small knapsacks. I still had a few items from my escape kit sewn into my pants legs, and some soap your mother had given me. The Basque guide, a big fellow, carried a huge pack on his back that seemed no more troublesome to him than carrying a pillow. The French guide, coming along behind us, was smarter. He had only a small backpack.”

Marshall paused, remembering the tension that oppressed the group, and the profound darkness.

“The trail was narrow, like an animal track, and we couldn’t see. There was a misty rain, and we all had the sniffles. The walking was easy at first. We were told to be absolutely quiet. We weren’t anywhere near the border patrols or guard posts, but we still had to be quiet. Then it got
very
dark—I mean pitch-black—and we had to hold on to each other by the belt or the jacket.

“Trying to be quiet, trying to stay awake, and not breaking the pace—it was worse than boot camp, that’s for sure. It was cold, but we were moving so vigorously that we were sweating. As we walked, I kept up my strength by telling myself I was responsible for the others. It was my duty. I was an officer. There was Hootie, and two guys who had bailed out near Bordeaux—enlisted men. And then there were two others, British civilians. I hoped they weren’t spies. If we got caught with spies in our group … But among us Americans I had the highest rank, so I tried to make sure we kept moving along in good order.

“After a few hours, we came to a long swinging bridge across a ravine. Somehow I could tell the ravine below was really deep. There was a sound of rushing water, but it was very faint, far away. It could have been half a mile down, I suppose.

“The crossing was slow. It was like being on a chain gang—a sniffling, blind chain gang, inching ahead. We just felt our way. Someone up ahead—I think it was one of the Englishmen—stumbled and we all swayed, holding on to the guide rope with one hand and the coattail of the guy ahead with the other. I doubt if the Basque guide held on; he was sure-footed as a mountain goat. But the rest of us were saying our prayers, swaying out there over nothingness. It took us so long to get across, the sky was getting light by the time we all made it.