Hunting Ground (30 page)

I’ve built this bonfire in the forest knowing they’ll see it from the house. As expected, they’ve sent André to reason with me, but I don’t trust any of them. Why should I?

Having made a careful circuit of the area to be certain they’ve sent no one else, I let him wait. He doesn’t yet know I’m close. I’ve walked in my bare feet—left those shoes they gave me by the fire, the stockings, too, so that he’ll see them and think I’ve gone to relieve myself. He won’t know that bare feet are so much better for hunting.

André has gained a good fifteen years, not the few that should have made him the fifty-seven he really is. The shoulders are slumped as if in defeat, there’s no pride, it’s all gone. The overcoat is the same grey tweed with the black velvet collar, but he has no hat and that just isn’t right, not with him.

Even so, I step from behind the trees. Without the wind to fan the embers, there’s barely light enough to see him on the other side of the ashes. ‘
Ah, bon
, André. It’s been a long time.’

‘Lily…’ He’s startled, casts a glance towards the house, wonders where the others are but somehow manages to ask, ‘How did you … ? How are you?’

Searching the darkness for the others, I tell him it’s not important how I came to be alive.

At once, he’s irritable. ‘The war’s over, Lily. It’s finished. Forget it.’

‘Me? How could I?’

‘Look, I know you must have suffered terribly, but …’

‘What could you possibly know of my suffering?’

‘Simone …’

‘
Ah, oui,
Simone. I’m sorry she didn’t make it.’

‘She was the price I had to pay. Did she …’

‘Say anything, this woman who loved you so much? Is that what you’re wondering? Yes, she said lots of things. She asked us not to blame you for what you’d done, and when she died, I know her last wish was that others, not just myself, should show compassion towards you.’

This humbles him, and he stares at the ashes as a gust fans them to life. ‘The Nazis left me no choice, Lily. They said they had arrested her, and that if I’d agree to give them certain information, they would look the other way.’

‘The Vuittons told you that. Schiller was with them and … and Jules.’

‘Yes. They all came to my surgery. Your sister was too involved, Lily. I couldn’t …’

‘My sister, yes. And Michèle Chevalier, André, and Henri-Philippe Beauclair. You told those bastards where they could be found, but Janine, she managed to get away.’

‘They ought to have known better! I warned them many times. Janine was too impetuous. She took far too many chances. Michèle was far too innocent. She didn’t know how to lie, for God’s sake. She …’

I wait. He knows it’s no good trying to tell me Michèle was the first to break. At last, he says, ‘How did Simone die?’

He really wants to know, and I can see that he must have dwelt on this matter day and night.

‘Bergen-Belsen, André. Can you believe it? We’d been in Birkenau, the death camp at Auschwitz. Finally, they sent us to Bergen-Belsen, a so-called convalescent camp. Typhus, dysentery like you wouldn’t believe, mass starvation, no water at the end. Sixty … eighty thousand of us, the men in one part, the women in another, the soup so rotten and thin, everywhere people were dying so fast their last breaths made a constant whisper. A hush as the squeaking, lime-encrusted wheels of the carts hauled the heaps of bodies to the pits for burning and burial by those who were left and could still wield a shovel, myself among them.’

He says nothing. He can’t lift his eyes, but I feel no elation, only an emptiness that is hard to describe because he was once my friend. ‘Bergen-Belsen, André. Do you know what that must have meant for a woman like Simone? She was so thin. She needed rest, warmth, love—medical attention. You’re a doctor. Surely, you can appreciate that?’

Doubtless my voice shows traces of madness, but I have to get it off my chest. ‘That camp is in a kind of fir forest, low and swampy. Mud is everywhere. Always there is the mud, but on the morning she died it was all churned up and frozen solid. The spring of last year. March the 20th, so near the end and yet so far. They always woke us at four thirty in the morning for the roll call. The
blockova
would bash her truncheon against the wall of the hut, then scream at us in German,
‘Raus! Raus! Schnell, Huren!’
Out! Out! Hurry, whores!
‘Herunter!’
Down!—that means down from our so-called beds, André. The din is horrible, the panic indescribable. Sleeping, half-dead, exhausted women tumble from the
Kojen
where, tier upon tier, crammed head to foot, we’ve spent our nights. Arms, legs—sticks of bone; ribs showing—we fight to reach the floor and get outside. We have to get outside. It’s an order. AN ORDER!

‘Fog blankets the camp. Frost rims the ground, the barbed wire, and the trees in the distance. Huddled in our filthy rags, we wait under the blinding glare of the searchlights. Always it’s,
‘Achtung! Achtung!’
from the loudspeakers.
‘Zum Appell! Fünf Seite an Seite!’
Line up, five (by five), side by side. Sixty thousand of us … One hundred thousand. I really don’t know how many. Lots and lots of men and women, but segregated, of course. Oh, yes.

‘The frozen mud hurts our feet. Some have shoes; some have none. Socks are mismatched, rags bound around their feet. Shit and blood and pus. Simone? I ask. Where’s Simone?

‘Frantically, I began to look for her. I ran back to our hut, but Pani Nalzinski, our
blockova
, wouldn’t let me get her. ‘Please,’ I begged. ‘She’s okay. She’s just a little tired. I guarantee you, she’ll be on her feet all day.’

‘It began to snow, but it wasn’t snow, André. It was ashes from the cremation fires that burned in the open. The
blockova
gave me one across the seat and another across the shoulders, shrieking at me to get back in line, me begging her to let me get my friend. ‘All right. Both die. If one no good, other no good.’

‘At eleven, the roll call was completed. Eleven, André. Nearly seven hours in the freezing cold and God help you if you had to relieve yourself. Eleven was the time for our block to go. There was a mad rush as the doors to the latrine were thrown open. Screams and yells accompanied the pandemonium, laughter, too, wild and shrill and broken by the insane. Blows rained on us from everywhere. Some vented themselves and fell under the blows to be trampled. Some tried to pick them up and were hit for so doing. Others just wept.

‘The hole received us. It was huge. You couldn’t have asked for bigger. A funnel that was fifteen metres deep, brimful and surrounded by a low wooden rail and the milling throng of fighting, pushing, shoving, anxious women.

‘There were no spaces—all were taken. There was no shame, how could there have been? The slippery earth was puddled with half-frozen excrement, the stench of ammonia so unbearable it made one weep.’

I pause. I let this information sink in, giving him time to lift his gaze from the ashes, but he can’t bring himself to face me.

Again, I wonder why he’s forgotten his hat. Is he still the Judas he was? ‘That rail, André, it was stained and greasy. Neither Michèle nor I could touch the ground with our feet when we sat on it, so for us it was a special ordeal to grip the rail, relieve oneself, and cling to your wife.

‘Simone was dizzy. She’d had constant dysentery. Months on end of it, poor thing, but she didn’t slip, André. We didn’t let her fall. Please, you must understand this. The three of us had stuck together through so much.

‘There was a shriek from one of the guards. We had to let go of her. She simply fell back into that cesspool, but if you ask me, I think she wanted to. The alternative for her was to be injected with phenol.’

His mouth gapes. A breath is caught and held. There are tears. He wants to hear the last of it and begs me to tell him.

‘She drowned. She threw up her arms in panic but never cried out, simply tried to swim to the edge, to claw at the mud and drag herself out, but they pushed her away, André. They laughed. Everyone watched her die like that—all of us, the women in their rags, the guards who’d pushed her back, the
blockovas
. A great circle of people, the fog of the ammonia rising all around her.’

He breaks at last and blurts, ‘I didn’t want them to take her away. I tried to kill myself, but they threatened to kill her if I did.’

He’s weeping now, but I won’t go near him. ‘They beat me terribly, André, for having tried to help her, but they let me live. Why I don’t know and I never will, for I wanted only to die.’

The wind fans the embers. There’s a spurt of flame that lets him see the Luger in my hand. That last plea of Simone’s comes back to me, and I know that before she went under, she begged me to forgive him. ‘Go and tell the others to come out one at a time. I want to talk to each of them alone.’

‘They’ll never agree to that. This was your only chance. Come and settle things now.’

‘I’m setting the terms, not them, and definitely not you.’

Again, he’s irritable. Again, he says, ‘Let it go, Lily. Forget it. You need psychiatric help. You’re suicidal.’

‘Simone was my friend long before she ever met you. When she died, a part of me went with her.’

There’s no response. He thinks I’m going to kill him, but again I remember that final look of hers and ask, ‘Who else is in there with Dupuis?’

‘The Vuittons.’

‘And Jules?’

‘Yes, Jules. Lily …’

‘Who else? There’s someone else.’

Something moves off to my right, another to my left. It’s Schiller. I know it is and hear it on André’s lips even as I fire.

The sound of the shot is all around us, flat and hard and echoing in the night. I run, slip, and fall, scream at them to leave me alone and fire blankly, once, twice, three times before sense returns and I hear Dupuis calling, ‘Madame … madame, come back. There’s something you should know.’

Schiller’s with them. Schiller! What am I to do? There are only two bullets left, and my chest aches so much I think I’m going to die.

Still they search for me, and I wait for it all to end, but finally they give up and go back to the house.

The slug has taken the back off André’s head. The hole in his forehead is really very small, just an entry—an excellent shot. Putting on those socks and shoes, I kick ashes over him as we did in the camps, then look for the lime but finally realize there just isn’t any.

Schiller … so Schiller has come back to join forces with them. Thinking of him puts me right back in Paris, just after that little episode of the broken glass, 3 June 1941. Me, I remember the date because it was Simone’s birthday and I hadn’t expected to find her hauled in with the rest of us.

The small hotel Dupuis took me to was on the avenue Matignon. A swastika hung above the entrance, but there were no guards standing in the rain, so I knew it wasn’t one of their major centres of interrogation. Indeed, except for the flag, you wouldn’t have known it was anything other than a delightful little hotel. Very upper class, very posh and convenient, and once an
hôtel particulier
, a private mansion.

Would we have to take the lift? I wondered. So many crazy things ran through my mind. The rue du Faubourg St-Honoré was at the corner, and just around it was the shop of Monsieur Langlois, where I had first met Tommy.

‘Madame,’ said Dupuis, tugging at my sleeve.

Tommy caught up with me there. It was there, in front of that very hotel, that I threw the ten thousand francs into his face and slugged him. Dear God, how our lives had changed since then.

Dupuis shoved me ahead, but suddenly I wanted to throw up, though knew I mustn’t. That place was only one of several the Gestapo used. Their real headquarters were at 11 rue des Saussaies, in the offices of the Sûreté Nationale, so I knew they’d take me there afterwards. Then it was prison. The children … what was I to do about them?

Michèle Chevalier was sitting at the near end of a long wooden bench. She was the first I saw, but there were benches on either side of the marble corridor with its fake Roman friezes and columns. All the places had been taken. On one side were my friends and people I thought I might be able to trust or simply didn’t know. On the other were a few of the dealers they’d managed to drag in, a few of the girls, and even some of the women of substance—all of them were guests at Jules’s dinner party for Göring, all were French, too, and therefore under suspicion.

Michèle was terrified. Looking the thin, bespectacled student of philosophy and politics he never was, Henri-Philippe was guarding her violin in its case and holding her by the arm. His glasses winked in the unnatural light.

We were forbidden to speak but, when I walked past my sister, she smiled and jerked a thumb-up and made all kinds of signals to say, It’s okay. They know nothing. Dupuis took it all in and let me wonder how long they’d all been cooped up and what they’d told them.

Simone and André were next. He was angry with me, but Simone, she had a calmness I can see even now. Remember, please, that she’d hidden Tommy and Nicki and that Tommy was probably again back with her, hence André’s anger.

‘Lily, it’s so good to see you.’

‘
Chérie,
it’s your birthday.
Ah, mon Dieu,
I’ve forgotten to bring your present. Dinner … can we have dinner together? I think I have enough coupons. Yes … yes …’ I fumbled in my handbag. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Her long black hair was all frizzed out. She’d been drying it much to André’s dismay.

‘You can’t be serious,’ he said, knowing we were breaking the rule of silence.

‘Oh, but we are,’ said his wife and laughs.

We kissed, we hugged. Dupuis was embarrassed. ‘Madame, it is forbidden. Please, Obersturmführer Schiller is waiting.’

Simone touched my cheek and gripped me by the hand to reassuringly squeeze the fingers. ‘Don’t worry, darling. Everything is okay. It’s only routine. Someone stole the Reichsmarschall’s things but us, ah’—she shrugged her slender shoulders and threw out open hands, palms up,—‘how could we be involved in such a thing? You’ll stay with us tonight, of course?’

Dupuis hustled me along to an office as I looked back at her and said, ‘We’ll have a little party for you.’