Lisette's List (25 page)

Finally, in November, he wrote.

Chère Lisette
,

The socks, oh, the socks. If I were a poet, I would write an ode to the socks knit by Lisette’s lovely fingers. Thank you from the bottom of my heart and the soles of my feet
.

To combat boredom, I have taken to counting things. It is my morose entertainment. One hundred and twenty days of waiting in the phony war, one day of fighting, six days in a cattle train, twenty-one days in that hellhole, Stalag XII-A, the transit camp in Limburg, and one thousand two hundred fifty-one days so far as a prisoner fighting a private war. How many days more?

Six horizontal bars in the miners’ cage descending eight levels. Three dead of exhaustion in the mine. I take stock of myself: Ten working fingers, ten dirty toes. Two ringing ears. A stretcher-bearer here says a man has twenty-four ribs. I can see fourteen of mine easily
.

One hundred twenty men in my barrack. Twenty barracks in this camp. Twenty-four hundred men using two rows of trenches as latrines. Bunks three tiers high. One stove in the center. When the man closest to it died and prisoners were ordered to drag him out, other prisoners took to fighting violently over his bunk. We are hardly human
.

For the sake of my life, remind me of Paris
.

Bien affectueusement
,

Max
                            

Oh, dear God, dear God. I closed my eyes and felt a responsibility, no, a yearning to knit together his wounded soul. I was sure André would have wanted me to help him.

6 DECEMBER 1943

Cher Maxime
,

In the spirit of your counting, here is Paris. Twelve streets radiate out from place de l’Étoile like spokes of a wheel surrounding the Arc de Triomphe. Thirteen streets cross the Champs-Élysées from there through les Tuileries to place du Carrousel. If you count each bridge separately from Pont d’Austerlitz to Pont de l’Alma, there are twenty-one, I think. You can see if I’m right when you return. Try to name them now. Eight connect Île de la Cité with the banks, and one small one connects the two islands. Pont Neuf has five arches on the southern span and seven on the northern span. Do you know the number of grotesque stone heads on the sides? Sister Marie Pierre made me count and describe them. There are over 380. Can you believe that? Six columns stand before the Panthéon. How many on La Madeleine? Are they Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian? Sister Marie Pierre would have demanded to know
.

How many portraits of Suzy Solidor are in La Vie Parisienne? Do you remember that we counted them once, before the cabaret show began? Thirty-three, I think. My favorite is Raoul Dufy’s because of the strong blues. How many steps from place Saint-Pierre up to Sacré-Coeur? My guess is eighty. How many wagons in the Funiculaire de Montmartre? How many galleries in the Louvre? You ought to know this last thing precisely
.

Which is the greater distance—the depth you go down in the mine or the height we can go up in the Eiffel Tower when you get back? We will count all of these things. You can be sure of that!

Reading this, he would have to sense that I ached for Paris nearly as much as he did. Ached to be there, but also ached for her, for her safety, her well-being, her suffering citizens fated to suffer more before this war was over.

It was silly, this counting, but it might occupy his mind for a few minutes with pleasant memories. It was only a substitute for what I wanted to say.

However, the most important things can’t be counted, Max. I’m thinking of the feel of spring in the air when they set out the tulips in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The bright colors of the marzipan fruit in the windows of confiseries. The cheerful melody of the organ grinder’s music box at place du Tertre, and the squeals of small children when his white-headed monkey takes their coins. The taste of roasted chestnuts sold on street corners in the fall, and the warmth of the paper cones in your hands. The slightly dank but not unpleasant smell of the Seine on foggy mornings. The exhilaration of being up in the Eiffel Tower after a rain. The sheen on the cobblestones, and on wet rooftops of Haussmann buildings with wrought iron balconies
.

I experienced again, as I was writing, the shivery thrill of being on the topmost platform, André on one side, Maxime on the other, and the adoring look in their eyes when my hair blew free.

Stop counting days, Max. Keep a list in your mind of things you want to do after your release, and we shall do them all
.

Bien affectueusement
,

Lisette
                         

I couldn’t bear to tell him that the German authorities had burned more “degenerate” paintings in Paris this year; nor did I mention
Herr Leutnant
and my relief that he had not found mine. I sent Maxime my rationed amount of canned sausages and a small tin of pâté. For Christmas, I saved my meat ration coupons in order to buy him a canned
terrine de canard
, plus another of
lapin
, sure that he would appreciate the taste of duck and rabbit, even in small quantities. He certainly wouldn’t get pâtés in a prison camp! In the same package I sent him André’s wool scarf and leather gloves. And at Midnight Mass, I lit two candles, one out of gratitude and one out of sorrow, and the flames made my falling tears glisten and sizzle.

T
HANKFULLY, HIS NEXT LETTER
was less despairing.

4 MARCH 1944

Chère Lisette
,

Thank you for the lifesaving reminders of Paris, and the lifesaving food as well. The scarf and gloves I recognize to have been André’s. For you to have parted with them shows a generous heart, which I hope can heal as time passes. They are helping me through the winter
.

The Red Cross delivered Christmas packets here. I had missed the last two deliveries because I was at the mining camp. I had my first taste of sardines in a year. Eight in the tin, shared with my ration mate. To celebrate, I decorated my mess tin with a yellow dandelion blossom. It looked like the sun I so rarely see. Van Gogh would have liked it
.

An Englishman in another barrack made a sign and posted it in three languages by the latrine:
DON’T THROW CIGARETTES INTO THE LATRINE AS IT MAKES THEM ALMOST UNSMOKEABLE.
It made me chuckle. I have asked my mother for
English and Italian language textbooks, whichever she can get
.

A couple of the young Brownshirts, storm troopers who run the camp, are humane fellows. I have had some halting conversations with the guard of my barrack about his home in Cologne and mine in Paris. Two spectacular cathedrals, we decided. Anyone who loves a cathedral cannot wholly serve evil. I traded twenty Red Cross cigarettes with him for seven sheets of paper and a new pencil. I am imagining your paintings from what André told me in order to draw them. If they are decent, and if I can save them, I will give them to you
.

It would be interesting to look up this fellow in ten years to see how he’s thinking. I am hopeful, at times
.

Très bien affectueusement
,

Max
                                    

T
HE EVENTS OF 1944
seemed to speed up. Our hearts beat faster and our love for France quickened as we anticipated an Allied invasion. We stayed in the café most days so as not to miss any shred of news from the BBC. Odette, my staunch café partner, and I held hands, held our breaths, and prayed. Then, at last, came the announcement from Vichy, reported by the German state radio at seven in the morning: D-Day had begun. The Allies had landed but would be swiftly annihilated, the announcer crowed. We waited more than two hours for a special BBC news bulletin confirming the landing on the beaches of Normandy. Despite inestimable loss of life, the Allies were moving inland. At noon, Churchill reported that all was going according to plan.

We hugged each other in gratitude, and all day, with watery eyes, I could think of nothing but those brave men and the dying they did on our beaches.

Not much work got accomplished in the next several days, with
so many people traipsing in and out of the café, asking for news. On the evening of 28 June we learned that American troops had liberated Cherbourg the day before. A cheer went up in the café. Monsieur Voisin couldn’t stop smiling, even at me. We felt the end wouldn’t be long now.

Bernard came in and ordered a bottle of champagne and two glasses. He strode over to my table and poured a glass for me.

“I didn’t think there was a bottle of champagne left in all of the Vaucluse,” I said and pushed the glass away, not wanting to encourage him.

“I need to tell you two things,” he said in a near whisper. “I was under pressure to escort that German patrol and was commanded to bring that lieutenant to your home. I didn’t tell them about the paintings. They knew already.”

“How?”

“I don’t like to say. The way they treated you made me want to beat both of them to a pulp. Thank God you relented.”

I supposed that I believed him.

The next day I wrote to Maxime in case he didn’t know of the liberation of Cherbourg, ending the letter with
Surely the Allies will recapture Paris soon
, and hoped the letter would not be censored.

O
N 15
A
UGUST
, an evening sultry with humidity, we learned that Allied amphibious troops and paratroopers had landed on the beaches of Provence as they had done in Normandy, and that they were fighting in the streets of Marseille as well. Dear Provence, dear Provence. If only Cézanne knew of the efforts to save her.

When I told Geneviève that night, she bleated some words of jubilation, a whole sentence, in fact. I’m sure it was “This is the age of courage.”

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, Bernard came to my door and said with authority and urgency, “Don’t go anywhere near Gordes, with or without Maurice. It’s a hotbed of the
Résistance
in the village as well as in the
maquis
terrain, the scrub woods below Mont Ventoux where
maquisards
hide out in between their forays against German troop movements. They attacked a German patrol near Gordes. I expect there will be some retaliation. There was a reprisal at Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt for some
Résistance
activity there. Villagers were rounded up and shot in the main square. So stay at home, I beg of you.”

“How do you know all of this?”

“It’s my job. I’m the
garde champêtre.
”

This time he was all business and left without lingering.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, a distant explosion blasted the air and was quickly followed by more. I ducked instinctively at each one. Between blasts I heard Geneviève bleating urgently, so I stepped outside and was rocked back on my heels by the impact of the explosions. She ran to me. Kooritzah, cowering in her coop, jumped crazily when she saw me.

“Some chicken you are. Stop flapping so I can hold you.”

I carried her inside and smoothed her feathers, with Geneviève close beside me. “It’s all right. It’s far away.”

But it wasn’t all right. Bombardments continued throughout the night. I went to the outhouse under an orange sky thick with smoke. The acrid smell made me choke. Gordes was burning just as Marc and Bella’s Russian village had burned. The lives. Oh, the lives.

In the morning, ashes black as the swastika blanketed the courtyard. Kooritzah did not lay an egg. Geneviève followed me around and butted me. Maurice came by, told me to stay at home, and left quickly.

The next day, the people of Gordes were ordered into their houses and were shot if they didn’t move fast enough. Then cannons
set up on the Bel-Air rock let loose a mighty barrage of explosions. About twenty houses were destroyed, and the people in them as well. The castle was dynamited, and five people were taken away as prisoners. Maurice heard it all from Aimé Bonhomme, who heard it from a resident of Gordes who had managed to escape to Roussillon.