Blue with Black Dots (The Caprice Trilogy Book 2) (34 page)

              “That’s why you call it
Constance
,” said Georgia.

              “It’s more of a wish,” said Simone.

              “That this place will be passed down uninterrupted?” said Georgia.

              “Indeed,” said Simone, “My father loved this place.  It was his castle within a republic.  He was a lord while he lived here and I was a princess.  This place doesn’t have the same meaning now.  I hold on to it because I should.  It, like my childhood here, was robbed from me.”  Georgia didn’t say anything.  She walked at Simone’s flank, mimicking the movements of a tele-journalist giving her subject time to think about what she wanted to say.

              “Are you familiar with the name
Fall Anton
?” asked Simone.  Georgia shook her head. 

              “If was a knife in the back,” said Simone, “As if the Nazis hadn’t done enough already.  You no doubt have heard of
Kristallnacht
.  What began with
Kristallnacht
, ended with
Fall Anton
, for all practical purposes.  Germany overran our Maginot Line fortifications by running around them.  British and French forces were repelled in Belgium and the Germans marched into France.  They called the whole affair the Battle of France, but we lost.  June 22, 1940, I was nine years old, a month shy of my tenth birthday.  The French government signed a pact with Germany at Compiègne that divided our country in two.  The Germans controlled the north, including Paris and including the Loire Valley, this place.  What became known as Vichy France was what was agreed would be the free zone, still governed by the French.  When Papa got word of the invasion of France from the north we left here and fled south to Vichy France.  But the Axis Powers had thought their occupation through.  As part of the agreement signed at Compiègne, many French soldiers were sent to Germany and impressed into service as laborers for the Nazi war machine.  The effect was to leave the remaining free French Zone virtually powerless.  Much of our standing army was in Germany working in factories, building weapons and equipment for the Nazis.  That left us undermanned and the Nazis knew it.  When the Americans and British invaded North Africa to free the French colonies from Nazi control, the Germans broke their part of the agreement.  Father had heard about it earlier, much earlier.  He was former French intelligence and had contacts.  After France signed the agreement with the Germans at Compiègne, there were mumblings about a potential invasion of the free zone from the very beginning.  Papa knew the plan was probably true and he knew the British-American presence would trigger the German invasion of Vichy France.  The Germans wanted to take the southern part of France to defend it against an incursion by the British and Americans coming up from North Africa.  So before the Germans started to invade the French Zone, Papa had us smuggled out of France.”

              Although Simone had stopped talking, she didn’t stop moving.  They continued forward toward an unlikely event, the end.  The long row of grapevines came to an end at the base of a steep hill.  The hill was only twice as high as Georgia herself but it was more of a wall than a hill.  The hill rose straight up out of the ground, nature’s limit to man’s endless engineering of grapevines.  The rows of grapes didn’t keep going neither did the two women.  They turned around and headed back toward
Chateau Constance
.  They chose a different row of vines to traverse.  Simone did more inspecting of grapes than recounting the past.  The two women stayed in near silence except for the dirt shifting beneath their feet and the gentle tap of the wind against the eardrum.  The sun still owned most everything on the property, except for Simone, her head was in the clouds.  She proceeded to inspect the grapes as if Georgia had left.

              “Too hard,” said Simone, as she inspected a bunch of grapes, Georgia said nothing.  They kept walking and the silence kept going.  Just when Georgia thought the silence would stop, it stood.

              “By now, the anticipation is drowning you, no?” said Simone.

              “I don’t know what I’m anticipating by now,” said Georgia.

              “That’s exactly where you should be,” said Simone.

              “According to whom?” said Georgia.

              “Adolf Hitler,” said Simone.

              “Why would I care about him?” said Georgia.

              “Because despite his intended extinction of my people and his mania, he did something’s exceedingly well,” said Simone, “That has to be true.  How else can someone rise from obscurity to become Lord of All Chaos?  You give the Devil his due, Georgia, always.  I know your agency teaches you Rule Number One is
know your enemies
but Rule Number Two has to be
learn from your enemies
.  They’re the best teachers.  You’ll get to know them by learning from them.  All the spy game is is being a student of your enemies.  Your friends are always idiots.”

              “And Hitler?” said Georgia.

              “He’s gone but he’s my enemy by definition,” said Simone, “His regime murdered my father.  They even used this house as a strategic headquarters when they took over this part of France.  They called it the Green House because of the green fields here in the Valley.  It was a play on the Brown House, Hitler’s preferred headquarters in Berlin.  They used to set up targets against the hill behind us and have target practice here in the vineyard.  By many accounts they used people as targets, no doubt Jews.  If it is true we’d find teeth and other remains buried near the hill.  We’ve never looked.  I have no interest in atrocities.  Hitler was a warped soul, full stop.  But you can learn from how he thought.”

              “I can’t say what he was thinking,” said Georgia.

              “He understood motivation,” said Simone, “He did what I just did to you.”

              “What?” asked Georgia.

              “I stayed silent,” said Simone, “I manipulated the sound of my own voice with silence.  I made my voice more powerful.  Hitler used to do the same when he spoke.  He would show up an hour and a half after the original time set for his speech.  Children were taken out of schools to hear his speeches.  Adults were on break from work, they would all be gathered into an athletic stadium to await his speech.  And they would wait and wait and wait.  Then he would arrive and shove his diatribe down everyone’s throat.  But he understood that something is better than nothing.  He understood, after so much sitting in silence, the people were more sensitive to his noise.  And his noise was impressive.  He was a speaker.  The man could carry an auditorium.  Food always tastes better when you’re starving, like your first glass of wine after a hard day’s work.  That first sip is like heaven on earth.  Even a mediocre vintage is top-shelf, because there was no shelf before.  Even if Hitler had been a mediocre speaker, his voice would have carried megatons.  It was the way he used it.  But he wasn’t even a mediocre speaker.  He was quite good.  Like I said, give the Devil his due.  Learn from your enemies.”

              “You want me to learn from you?” said Georgia.

              “I do,” said Simone, “But you’ll learn more from me if you’re not my enemy.”

              “You said your father was killed,” said Georgia, “Why didn’t he evacuate with you?

              “He could have but he stayed to protect our interest here.  He knew once the Allies appeared in Africa the Germans would be forced into concessions at some point and France would go back to being French-controlled.  The Germans had already taken this place from us, in addition to Papa’s flat in Paris.  He stayed to make sure we had some assets after the War, so that we would have somethings to come back to.  We were Jews but we were
les sang bleu
, French blue bloods.  Our family had business interests in much of France and we employed many people.  We even had twenty or so people here at our house working around the house and in the vineyard.”

“Papa sent us to Tahiti, just mama and me.  We lived in Papeete.  It was French territory so we didn’t have to show up like refugees.  We stayed there until I finished high school.  Mama didn’t want to move me around while I was in school so we stayed.  Even though the war was over my second year of high school.  We stayed till ’49, when I graduated.  It was too long. I got island fever.  So I left for Algeria to go to university and mama followed.  Even four years after the War, I had mixed feelings about returning to France as a Jew.  They made it clear that we were more Jew than French.”

              “Why did you chose Algeria?” asked Georgia. 

              “There’s many answers to that question, but the most simple answer is that it was easier,” said Simone, “There was a Sephardi Jewish community in Algeria back then.  It may seem surprising but at the end of the war, contemporary French society wasn’t exactly ready to give Jewish survivors any measure of sympathy.  Some even blamed us, saying we made the occupation tougher on everyone else.  They felt like we put so many others in the crosshairs.  If a French Catholic man married a French Jewish woman, the children as well as the wife were targets of the Nazis.  The Catholic grandparents were apt to blame the wife of their son for their grandchildren being sent to Nazi concentration camps.  It was her
Jewishness
that was to blame.  Even neighborhoods that had well-off Jewish residents blamed their Jewish neighbors for the arrival of the Vichy police.  They wanted us to simply go quietly and not make a scene when the Vichy police came to arrest us.  We were to blame for disturbing the peace.”  Simone paused before continuing.

              “They weren’t so welcoming to French Jews who escaped occupied France and then came back making inquiries about their assets.  It was very strange.  Even amongst the things I’ve seen since, it still stands out in my mind as a very strange reaction. The attitude was as if
you have your life what do you want more?
  Not realizing your life is the sum total of the things you have worked for.  If that’s taken, it’s up to your heirs who have the youth and energy to try to fight to claim some of it back.  That’s why we were in Algeria.  My mother made frequent trips back and forth between here and Algeria trying to wrestle whatever she could back.  She hired lawyers, but she was easily taken advantage of.  She was used to being taken care of by my father and she thought her lawyers would do it in his place but her lawyers weren’t my father.  And she was no fighter,” said Simone.

              “Did she get this house back,” said Georgia.  Simone shook her head.

              “All me, all mine,” said Simone, “I’m not hard on her.  She taught me a lot.  I learned from her mistakes, all her mistakes.”

              “How were you able to succeed when she didn’t?” asked Georgia, “How did you get this back?”

              “I didn’t use lawyers, I used names,” said Simone, “All of my father’s old friends, especially the ones who collaborated with the Nazis to protect their assets.  They did so at my father’s expense.  They betrayed him to the Nazis to ensure they would be seen as cooperative.  But it worked.  They stayed rich.  We lost everything.”

              “How did you find out?” asked Georgia.  The question seemed to hit Simone with the bounce of a tennis ball.  It echoed and came back to Georgia.

              “I don’t want you to think coming back to France was easy,” said Simone, “I lost my polish.  My French language wasn’t upper class like my early education.  Living in Algeria and Polynesia had its way with me.  Some of my vocabulary was Polynesian or Algerian French.  I could prove I was my father’s daughter but I wasn’t entirely blue blood anymore. I came back to France from Algeria in 1961.  By then, the war for Algerian independence had started and ironically there was no safer place for me to be than France.  So I came back.  But like all wars, the war in Algeria stirred emotions here in France.  When I came from Algeria, people didn’t know how to see me.  I was from a blue blood family but I wasn’t entirely blue anymore.  Have you ever heard of a
Pied-Noir
?”  Georgia looked at Simone with a bewildered look.  As if that wasn’t enough.  Georgia shook her head to relay her confusion at the term. 

              “It was a name given to the French people who lived in French Algeria, non-Algerian French people,” said Simone, “But you understand the translation.”

              “Black Foot,” said Georgia.  Simone nodded her head.

              “If you lived on African soil, your feet became black,” said Simone, “If you came back to France, despite being European, your feet were still black.  You were a
Pied-Noir
, a Black Foot.  The name was especially used for us who were part of the Sephardic community living in Algeria.  In Algeria, I was the French.  But in France, I was the Algerian.  Despite my family name, I wasn’t officially a blue blood anymore.  I had lived for years in Algeria, so I was a Black Foot.  I was a déclassé; my social status was undetermined.  I used to call myself blue with black dots.”