A Prince Without a Kingdom (38 page)

She nearly hung up.

“Take your parents with you and disappear for a few days!” bellowed Boulard at the other end of the line.

“So you’re interested in me all of a sudden? If I’d known that you were going to drop us, Superintendent, I wouldn’t have reunited you and your mother. She would still be in Scotland.”

The Cat knew that Boulard was very grateful for what she had done a few years earlier to make sure his mother was safe.

“I did everything I could to help you,” said Boulard.

“You shouldn’t have left your job.”

“Don’t be so naive. There was no sense in it. If I freed three people for you, the next day I brought in fifty for the chief of police.”

Boulard had been courageous from the outset. Two days before the arrival of the Germans, in June 1940, he had attempted to move all the files referring to the origins of French citizens. With his troops, he had organized a chain to transport the boxes from police headquarters to two barges. But the boats were intercepted before reaching their destination.

The Cat heard Madame Boulard wrestling the telephone from her son.

“Hello? Auguste is a blockhead, I’ll grant you. But today, you really must listen to him, my dear. Your address is on the list.”

“Which list?”

“They’re going to arrest more Jews.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” quipped the Cat.

And she hung up.

That same evening, however, she had put her pride to one side and spoken to her parents.

They had smiled at first. Yes, everyone had heard the rumors. Ferdinand Atlas trusted the state. His family wasn’t clandestine: they were French and, what’s more, they had been French for generations. Not only that, but he had made sure he was reregistered every time it was required. The police were just trying to pacify the Occupier. This was understandable.

Ferdinand took out his wallet, containing his identity card with
JEW
stamped on it in big red letters. He held out the card for his daughter to see. All his paperwork was in order with the authorities. It was as if he believed the stamp protected him. He had nothing to hide.

But when the Cat explained that this recommendation came from a former police superintendent, Ferdinand Atlas shot his wife a confused glance.

And so all three of them caught the train to Trouville the day after Bastille Day. The Cat had never traveled with her parents before. She spent two weeks walking on the beach, wading out into the waves, and watching her mother sleep in the sun, an open book on her face to protect her fair complexion. They returned at the end of the month.

“There! You see! Everything’s as it should be! Nobody came after all,” declared Ferdinand, striding through the rooms of his house.

There were tears in his eyes, and he felt ashamed for having doubted his country.

The Cat resumed her clandestine life, and never went back home.

But one Sunday in September, French police officers came to knock politely at the door. They escorted the Atlas parents off the premises. It was only when they were in the car that Ferdinand noticed he was still wearing his slippers.

“I’ll just pop back upstairs for my shoes.”

In the backseat, his wife gripped his arm.

“You won’t be needing them,” said the officer.

The Cat found out three days later. She entered her house via a skylight. The household staff had fled. On a tray at the foot of the unmade bed were two croissants as hard as fossils. Through Mouchet, at the prefecture, she tried to obtain information without revealing that these were her parents. In early December, Max Grund set up his offices in the house.

Paris, the Odéon crossroads, December 21, 1942

Mouchet kissed Marie on the neck as if she were his girlfriend. She had a student’s satchel slung over her shoulder. He led her into the cinema. On the screen, two soldiers on horseback were trotting up a mountain. A few spectators were smoking three rows in front of them. Another was sleeping at the back.

“Give me the mail; I’ve got to go,” she whispered.

“Wait. I need to speak to you. An airplane is going to parachute in a Frenchman on Christmas Eve, in the night, near Chartres. He’s coming from London, and he’s going to train three of our men for radio transmissions. It can’t be done in Paris.”

“So?”

“Caesar is thinking of sending all of them to Saint John.”

“I don’t think Saint John would like that.”

“I want to meet this Saint John.”

“I’ll ask him. He only talks to me. Let me go now.”

“Ask him. It’s very urgent.”

As she stood up, Mouchet grabbed her hand. Their neighbor was watching them. Mouchet started whispering into the Cat’s hair as if they were lovers.

“Those people you wanted to find — the Atlases — they’re no longer at the camp at Pithiviers. They left on the twentieth of September.”

“Where?”

“They’re still taking them eastward. We don’t know where. They’re not in France anymore.”

Some medieval music was now accompanying the film.

“One of the envelopes is for Caesar again; it contains some very important documents. The other one is for you — it’s about your friends.”

“They’re not my friends.”

“Silence, up front!” called out the man who was dozing in the back row.

“I’ve put in everything I could find out about the Atlases,” whispered Mouchet. “There’s a form with all the places they’ve been to. One last thing, Marie. I need to speak with Boulard as well. Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

She left, without mustering the strength to open her own package. That evening, she was back on the roof of the Palais-Royal. After sliding the new piece of mail through the gap in the shutter, she warmed herself up for a moment against the clumps of terra-cotta chimney pots that jutted out from the rooftop. Beneath her woolen vest was the envelope from Mouchet. She still couldn’t bring herself to open it.

La Reine Morte
was playing at the Comédie-Française. Tonight’s performance was over. Some of the spectators lingered in the foyer, making the most of the warmth.

The Cat spent the night in the theater’s attic, where she was reunited with a violin. She had hidden it there, a long time ago now, between the beams. She didn’t touch it.

In the morning she took a train to Le Mans, then caught the express Manche-Océan ferry, which dropped her off in Nantes.

The day passed by in a flash, and by six in the evening she was walking along the exposed path that linked the mainland to the island of Noirmoutier at low tide. It was dark. She avoided the German guardrooms, whose lights she could spot on both shores, and cut across the sandbanks instead. Saltwater pools were bristling with life. She heard the crabs scuttling away.

The Cat knew that she couldn’t turn up on Saint John’s doorstep in the middle of the night. So she slept in a tiny hut between the salt marshes, warmed by three donkeys huddling below her.

La Blanche Abbey, Noirmoutier, off the shores of western France, December 22, 1942

Mother Elisabeth (all one hundred kilos of her beneath a spotless habit) was the most terrifying force known to the island of Noirmoutier since its invasion by the Vikings in the ninth century after Jesus Christ. She had reigned over the abbey at La Blanche for forty years. No bishop had ever dared mention the word
retirement
to her. And not even the German soldiers who had set up headquarters in the château a few kilometers away were prepared to take any risks inside the abbey’s high walls. They had trampled over three quarters of Europe, but they took off their boots at the threshold when they turned up timidly at La Blanche in order to buy a small pot of honey or some radishes.

Everyone was frightened of Mother Elisabeth, but she was universally admired. The large walled garden at the abbey fed a good proportion of the island. Three of the sisters ran a health center in the mill to the south of the abbey, which had a better reputation than some provincial hospitals. The choir was magnificent. The services for Christmas and the Assumption attracted the whole diocese.

People would have been even more amazed if the public had been able to glimpse, at nightfall, the fiercely contested soccer matches that the nuns played on the beach, or the midnight swims on Easter Sunday, after prayers. Hallelujah! The shrieks of joy from the waves must have traveled all the way up to the Loire estuary.

And yet, aside from these openings onto the world, La Blanche was a citadel that no one could enter. The few children who had tried scaling the wall in order to steal a Z pear — allegedly the juiciest pear in the west, and a sub-species of the classic Williams Bon Chrétien variety — bitterly regretted it. They had received an almighty walloping on the backside from the holy mother.

The Cat rang the bell at the main gates. Two black eyes appeared behind a small grille.

“Our holy mother is in the chapel. She’s singing.”

“Tell her that the Cat wishes to speak with her.”

“The Cat?”

“Yes.”

“As in —”

“As in the small furry animal.”

“Don’t you have a name that’s a bit more . . .”

“Serious sounding?”

“I’ll have to interrupt the Christmas rehearsal. The sisters will all be staring at me. So, if I announce that the Cat —”

“Are you new here, Sister?”

“Yes.”

“Tell her it’s about Saint John.”

“The Evangelist?”

“Yes.”

“That’s better. That’s what I’ll say. And you can talk to her about the Cat, if you like. Take a seat on the bench. I feel bad about leaving you out in the cold.”

Sister Bertille walked across a former lawn, which had been transformed into a potato field when war had broken out: a fine example of the nuns’ pragmatic approach. She headed along the cloister and pushed open a door. Strains of Christmas carols could be heard. Sister Bertille crossed a courtyard and entered the chapel.

Fifty nuns were singing “Mid the Ass and Oxen Mild” in six- or seven-part harmony, their eyes raised heavenward, with enough emotion to make the listener forget that this was hardly a masterpiece of religious music. The carol’s thousand divine angels could be heard hovering beneath the vaults. Mother Elisabeth was standing on a box before the choir, stirring the air convincingly.

It took her a while to notice Bertille blushing by the door. She conducted until the end of the refrain before bringing the choir to a halt.

As Mother Elisabeth turned around, there was a splitting noise from the wooden crate beneath her clogs.

“Well, Sister Bertille? Is it the general?”

“No, Mother Elisabeth.”

The question “Is it the general?” was Mother Elisabeth’s stock-in-trade. She requested not to be disturbed unless General de Gaulle was landing with the English. It was her only way of ensuring peace and quiet. Whenever someone came to ask her a question while she was meditating in the garden, whenever someone interrupted her while she was at work, whenever someone raised her hand in the course of the nuns’ silent meals, she always responded with: “Is it the general?”

“So, Bertille, you’re not guarding the gates?”

“There’s a young lady who wishes to speak with you.”

Bertille didn’t dare pronounce the Cat’s name.

“She says it’s about Saint John.”

“Sister Marieke, would you kindly replace me?”

A pretty nun stepped out from one of the rows and helped Elisabeth get down off her crate before climbing up onto it herself. The abbess was now reunited with her walking stick, and she began issuing instructions as she made her way toward the chapel door.

“It’s not working with the twelve sisters at the front; we can’t hear ‘Sleep, sleep, sleep, my little child.’ So, Sister Marieke, you’ve got a choice: either make them sing more loudly, or remove the basses. I’m thinking of Sister Véronique, right at the back, who would be most useful in the kitchen when it comes to peeling the Jerusalem artichokes.”

Everyone turned toward one of the choristers in the back row, who went pale beneath her freckles.

“Do your best, my sisters. May I remind you that Christmas is in three days’ time, and I’m counting on the collection to mend the roof. Be brilliant. I don’t want to leave you in abject poverty when I die. Which won’t be long now: I’m nearly as old as Marshal Pétain.”

The door slammed shut.

Bertille and the abbess crossed the first courtyard and headed back along the cloister before skirting the potato field.

“Open the gates, Sister.”

Sister Bertille did as she was told. The Cat appeared, and Mother Elisabeth kissed her on the forehead.

“Come with me, my daughter. Given the hour, we’ll have to go this way.”

The nun led the new arrival beyond the enclosure, and the Cat offered her arm. Bertille watched them heading off, flanking the exterior wall, in the direction of the sea.

“Those aviators you sent us last time were charming. My sisters would have liked to keep them forever. But they didn’t have a calling for our way of life.”

The Cat smiled.

“I hope you’ll find us some French Canadians. With the English, I can’t speak their language. But I managed to convince the swarthy handsome one with a head wound to repaint the chapel. He wasn’t allowed to be outside in the sun, so at least he wasn’t wasting his time.”