Crossing the Borders of Time (29 page)

In this provincial milieu, a young man like Roland did not go unnoticed. Tall and exceedingly handsome, he exuded an air of brooding reserve and poetic detachment that only added to his allure. Conversely, he could transform the slightest occasion into a party by way of his own wholehearted, delighted engagement, and as the only son between two loving sisters, he responded to women with natural charm. His silken attentions were validating without being demanding, and by always displaying impeccable manners, he put women at ease. Innately, he knew how to make them feel lovely and wanted, reflecting their most attractive view of themselves.

Before long, the young man who had shyly shared first kisses with Janine as they lay in the river reeds of Mulhouse fell under the spell of a woman a decade older than he. The moral distinctions that strictly confined the sexual rites of his generation would not have allowed him to take advantage of a respectable, inexperienced girl. But when the beautiful wife of a high-ranking French reserve officer called up to war invited Roland to sample a full range of intimate pleasures, he could find no reason not to accept. Set aside was the fact that her absent husband happened to be one of his father’s important business associates.

She was a former haute-couture model from Paris. Roland suspected she’d met and married her textile magnate through a thread in the weave of fabric and fashion, expecting a life of luxurious privilege. With her husband at war, however, she was bored and cut off in her place of safekeeping in crusty Villefranche, sufficiently bored, it would shortly be clear, to risk introducing a special young man to the petaled secrets that bloomed in her bed. Within a few months of the Arcieris’ arrival, she had picked Roland out on the rue Nationale. But it was his father, Emil, who inadvertently brought them together by hosting a company dinner that first Christmas in town where they wound up sitting across from each other. Before the main course at the city’s best restaurant, her wriggling toes were creeping under the cuffs of the young man’s trousers and brashly teasing their way up his calves. She smiled and daintily sipped at her wine and exchanged pleasantries with all of the guests, company people with their spouses and children, even as she pursued her adventure.

After the New Year, she approached Emil at the office to ask a favor. She was planning an extended visit to Lyon, she said, and wondered if she might borrow Roland to help with her luggage on the train to the city. There was too much for a woman like her to manage alone. But when Roland showed up at her door as requested, he was nonplussed to discover she had already sent her baggage ahead and so was encumbered only by a small alligator train case and a high-strung fox terrier named Pepi. She insisted nonetheless that Roland come along, and when they descended in Lyon and reached her hotel, she was pleased to invite him up to her room. In the period that followed, instead of pondering inheritance law, Roland attended his own private classes in a subject of far more immediate interest. This understandably helped to chase Janine from his thoughts and succeeded in making the
drôle de guerre
all the more
drôle
as long as it lasted.

The Arcieris assumed they were safe in Villefranche until the fighting broke out the following spring of 1940, and when the Germans arrived within twenty miles of town, they reacted in terror with everyone else. Loaded in two cars and a truck filled with bolts of company fabrics, the Arcieris joined the mass exodus, traveling over the volcanic peaks of the Massif Central, southwest toward Toulouse and the border of Spain. When they ran out of gas, they readily measured and traded yard goods for distance, the fabric that always paid them their wages serving them now directly as money. Indeed, its value was even more reliably stable than the teetering franc, given the fact that the country itself stood naked and shuddering while the Germans pursued their relentless assault.

By June 19, 1940, five days after the Germans took Paris, Lyon declared itself an open city, avoiding attack by permitting the
Wehrmacht
to enter without opposition. The same day, a swastika flew over the entrance of its ornate city hall; German military bands exultantly marched on the place Bellecour with tubas, trumpets, drums, and trombones; and the beloved place des Terreaux with its opulent Bartholdi fountain and outdoor cafés was transformed into an assembly point for enemy troops and the spot the
Wehrmacht
selected for parking its trucks. Before the Germans’ withdrawal from this first occupation of Lyon the following month, ten thousand French prisoners of war would be locked into its Part-Dieu barracks and most then deported to face nearly five years in prison over the border.

The
Wehrmacht
parked its trucks on the beautiful place des Terreaux behind Lyon’s seventeenth-century hôtel de ville (city hall)
.
(photo credit 11.1)

With the unexpected fall of the country, the Arcieris returned to Villefranche, where they remained until almost the end of the year, when their company summoned them home to Mulhouse. The armistice, by shifting the border once more and labeling Alsatians as Germans again, placed the Arcieri sons, Roland and his younger cousin André, at new risk. Although born in the period Alsace was French, they could now be forced to take up arms for the Führer. But Roland’s parents would not play along: they decided instead to leave him behind in the Unoccupied Zone, where the hazards of being twenty years old, fit, and Alsatian were far less likely to result in his being sent into battle. André, then sixteen, would return to school in Mulhouse, his parents convinced that before
he
reached the age of conscription, the British would also cave in to Hitler and the war would be over. It was thoroughly inconceivable to them that four years later, England would still be toughing it out with the help of its allies, and André would be caught in the carnage of Hitler’s attempt to overtake Russia. Among 130,000 young Alsatians forced to fight for the Reich, André made it back, but there were 36,000 others who would never return.

As 1940 drew to a close, before going back home, Emil arranged the details of life for his son in Lyon. He rented a room in a war widow’s apartment in a sedate part of town, secured him a part-time job in a notary’s office, and urged him on with his study of law. None of which Roland would have chosen: the widow’s apartment remote and confining, the job ill paying and dreary, and the law a subject of dubious value in a world where authority devolved from force of arms. Who, Roland wondered, decided these matters, all the harsh new rules and restrictions that popped up every day in official pronouncements from Vichy? Where was the law endorsed by the people that gave Germans the right to dictate from Paris? That empowered Pétain—a man Roland viewed as a senile, self-righteous, sanctimonious toady—the right to act on behalf of the nation? Just days before, Pétain had banished from Lyon its beloved mayor, Edouard Hérriot, who had served in that post for thirty-five years, but had opposed the armistice with Hitler and abstained from the parliamentary vote that granted the marshal unlimited power. No, from Roland’s perspective, the law didn’t make much sense anymore. “
Le droit mène à tout
,” his father had told him. The law leads to everything. To which Roland had retorted, “
Oui, le droit mène à tout—à condition d’en sortir!
” Yes, it leads to everything, on the condition that you can escape it.

Ambition was still not the thing that sparked Roland to action. Not the glitter of wealth, the rescue of country, the lust for battle, or the cause that captured his talents and time. The confusion of his national background—Italian, French, German, Alsatian—only fed his cynicism. He saw himself as less inclined to fight for ideals than to dwell in ideas, as an observer or critical thinker rather than as a reformer or soldier. Little use did he find for nationalism, militarism, or even patriotism that set populations to destroy one another, laying claim to individual freedom. Although reared as a Catholic, he distrusted the hold of religion that tended to choke the joy out of life through rigid, judgmental codes of behavior and the sting of guilt whipping the conscience. His convivial spirit favored inclusion, and—while Vichy fell in step with the Nazis and anti-Semitism crept into the open—he would notice only in retrospect that his own closest friends all had been Jews.

Politically, Roland was decidedly liberal, and he reacted with disdain and revulsion to the rightist “rehabilitation” of France fustily championed by Marshal Pétain. That past November, when the marshal paraded through Lyon to rally morale and garner support, Roland had remained at home rather than witness the crowd’s adulation, but the city’s newspapers described it all. Four months after the German Army withdrew from Lyon, banner headlines attested to the public acclaim that served to create the aura and pretense, at least for a day, of a populace thrilled by the outcome of war that imposed defeat but avoided destruction.

WITH ALL ITS SOUL LYON ACCLAIMS PÉTAIN
, the front page of
Le Nouveau Journal
declared on that Tuesday, November 19. Pictures showed the old Verdun hero standing in uniform in the back of an open car with motorcycle escorts guarding his flanks, as he rode through the streets saluting the thousands who packed the sidewalks and fervently cheered all along the route of procession. People still smarting from France’s ignominious fall yearned to find the resolve of a leader—someone to blaze a trail to the future by restoring a version of France that was lost in the past—in a man over eighty who slept during meetings and was ready to do the enemy’s bidding.

Roland tried to blot it all out. He rushed headlong and laughing toward what he enjoyed, rejecting Vichy’s dour nose-to-the-grindstone perspective in favor of his own manifesto. With everything in a state of upheaval, what sense did it make to worry or work or save for the future? With the country grappling with transition and loss, he would content himself with owning the present.
On verra ça après la guerre
—we’ll see about it after the war—was the motto Roland adopted. He quit his stifling notary job, started cutting law school lectures, and spent his days with like-minded students who directed their competitive zeal to winning at cards—belote and bridge the games they favored. After the armistice the previous June, when his paramour of six lively months returned to the arms of her husband home from the front, Roland plunged into bridge as a daily obsession. In that he excelled, his observant nature and analytical skills adding to his luck as a player. Freely he spent the money he had, particularly once his parents left him to live in Lyon alone.

On n’est jamais aussi bien servi que par soi-même
. His father’s old maxim provided a measure of justification: one is never as generously served as by oneself. But in his case, in serving himself, he also genially treated his friends. His own munificence tugged at his pockets and stretched them wider than they were deep, a condition that worried him not at all.

As in Villefranche or Mulhouse before, but now on a far more glamorous scale, Roland found his way in the evenings to the route of Lyon’s informal parade. It progressed up and down the broad rue de la République, one of the main boulevards of the Presqu’île, the vital center strip of the city, whose name describes its formation as “almost an island.” It is a long, narrow, bustling peninsula between two rivers: the Saône to the west, the Rhône to the east, with twenty-eight bridges then spanning their waters. (The Germans would later bomb twenty-seven.) Streetcars ran on the rue de la République in both directions, their overhead cables tracing spidery webs against the sky. And just as Roland had determined in Mulhouse, with streetcars obscuring the view of the opposite sidewalk, it was essential to walk on the “right” side. After all, why waste one’s time on the
trottoir des cocus
and miss spotting the friends one most hoped to encounter? Here he instantly sensed that the west was the side where the young people walked, and among the throngs, Roland bumped into a fellow university student, Roger Dreyfus, whom he had known slightly in Mulhouse and latched on to now as the closest of friends.