Violins of Autumn (32 page)

Denise and Marie embarked on a mission to nurse me back to health. There was no talking them out of it. It took a while for me to realize Denise was doing some healing of her own. Even though she wasn’t responsible for the torture I endured, I could convince only her mind of that. Not her heart. If she needed to help me, I owed her the chance to do it.

In the weeks I grew stronger and healthier, Paris weakened, as its occupiers packed up and pulled out. By the middle of August, the Metro no longer ran at all, electricity became available only for an hour or two each day—and then during the middle of the night when hardly anyone needed it—restaurants closed up for days at a stretch, and the city fell into a state of chaos and fear, with firefights between the Resistance and remaining Germans taking place in the streets.

But during that time, normal life began to return. On daily walks like the one Denise, Marie, and I are about to set off on, we
saw hundreds of children playing in the Seine to cool off in the summer heat and a couple eagerly prying apart the makeshift wooden signs that relabeled the streets in German.

“You look good today,” Marie says. Cradling my face in her hands, she rotates my head left and right. “The sun has put some color back into your cheeks. Did you take your vitamin supplements this morning? Did you eat every bite of your breakfast?”

I squirm free. “Yes, I did. Denise tried to force-feed me the last time I didn’t.”

Overhearing me as she steps outside and closes the door to Dr. Devereux’s home, Denise laughs.

“I will do whatever is necessary to have you looking like your old self again,” she says. “Protruding hipbones and sunken cheeks will never be in fashion.”

The two months I spent away from a mirror has given me a distorted sense of my self-image. Looking down at my body in prison, I saw slimmer arms and legs. I ran my hands over bony bumps and ridges that used to be comfortably padded. But I assumed I looked pretty much the same as always, just a little thinner. Nothing could have prepared me for seeing the girl who gaped back at me from the gilded mirror in Dr. Devereux’s upper hallway when I got the go-ahead to leave my bed. Her gaunt face, sinewy neck, and dead stare repulsed me. She’s a stranger. I don’t want to be her.

It feels as if my interrogators still maintain a hold over my life, a stranglehold at my throat. I was freed from prison, but I’m not free from what they did to me there.

“Last evening, there was a firefight at the end of our avenue,” Marie says as we walk. “The Resistance shot two German soldiers dead. From my bedroom window I saw their bodies, lying
in the middle of the street where they fell. Two women ran over and stole the boots right off their dead feet, to sell on the black market, I guess. The fighting was so close a stray bullet hit the stone lion that guards the entrance to our building. Poor Gustav. He has only one good ear now.”

We jump back to the safety of the sidewalk when a truck speeds around the corner. It rounds another corner so quickly I barely have time to make out the faded mark of the French Forces of the Interior on the truck’s side.

“The truck was transporting women,” Marie says. “Why do you think that is?”

“Let’s find out,” Denise says, striding away.

It seems like only yesterday I had athletic abilities to take pride in. I fall into an uncoordinated run, determined to keep up with Denise and Marie.

By the time we catch up with the truck a boisterous crowd is already gathering around it. Through a separation between two onlookers, I watch a man wearing an FFI armband raise a pair of scissors into the air. He shows the long blades of gleaming steel to the crowd. A cheer goes up.

People emerge from all directions to join the crowd. Denise, Marie, and I work into places at the outskirts of the group.

Another member of the French Forces jumps into the back of the open truck. Above his head, he shakes a battered paper sign that reads
LE CHAR DES COLLABORATRICES
.

The women in the truck collaborated with the Germans.

Whenever the crowd shifts, I glimpse the four women, lined up and on display for all to see, covering their faces with their hands in shame.

The wielder of the scissors waves a fistful of chestnut-brown
hair. The crowd roars. They hurl insults. When he has chopped the length of the woman’s hair until nothing but stubble remains, he moves on to the next woman. The taunting continues.

The brutality of being roughly shorn like some farm animal resonates through me. A terrible wave of nausea sweeps over me.

Men press against me to get a better look, closing me in, tapping my feet out of the way with their boots. Elbows jostle for space. I feel the tension budding in the air, eager to bloom into violent bedlam.

A man in the crowd cracks one of the women on the back of her head with his hand. I tremble, unable to catch my breath, listening to her cries.

Denise lays her hand on my shoulder. “Adele, maybe you shouldn’t be watching this.”

As Denise directs me by the arm, the woman who was shaved first lowers her hands from her face. Our gazes connect and lock for an instant. Her expression is one I wished to never again see on another woman. I have to look away.

Crying, Marie says, “Those poor women. Someone should do something to stop that.”

“No!” Denise says, and her vehement retort makes Marie cry even harder. “Women like those four sent fellow countrymen and women to abysmal prisons. To German camps. To starvation and slow, agonizing deaths. Women like our Adele. Traitors are what they are, the lot of them. So they could be wined and dined and knock boots with a German officer? For God’s sake, it’s only hair. It will grow back. They’re getting off lucky, if you ask me!”

Denise storms ahead of us, swiping at her eyes. She stops abruptly in the middle of the street and waits for us to catch up.

She hooks her arm through Marie’s and says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lashed out at you.”

“I understand.” Marie blushes, unable to look Denise in the eye. “And you’re right. It is only hair, after all.”

Yes, it may be only hair. But without hers, Dr. Devereux’s wife isn’t nearly as pretty.

From my bed, I listen to Denise’s footsteps padding down the hallway. Her distinctive tiptoe usually returns to a chipper march once she’s passed my bedroom, but this time she doesn’t go beyond the partially closed door. My afternoon nap will have to wait.

“Adele, are you awake?” she whispers.

I roll onto my back. “Yeah, come on in.”

Denise slowly enters the room, smiling, but something about her expression is off.

“Denise, what’s the matter?”

“I have news. It’s big news. I wanted to make sure you’re in the right frame of mind to deal with it. You know, with the chest pain and palpitations you’ve been having.”

Between her pastiness and twitchy smile, I can’t read her expression at all. What is she trying to tell me? Part of me wishes she’d just come out with it, and part of me wishes she wouldn’t.

“So, are you feeling all right, Adele?” she asks.

After a night crammed end to end with nightmares that seemed truer than life, I’ve taken a big step backward. Dreams of the night Pierre died in my arms always leave me feeling numb and beaten up and exhausted and ready to cry at the drop of a hat.
I imagine myself standing alone on the brink of a seaside cliff, engulfed by bleak, stormy skies. If I fall to the jagged rocks beneath I won’t care. I fought to survive in prison. I could’ve given up plenty of times. And now that I’m safe, on days like today, I’m apathetic about dying.

“I feel okay. What do you have to tell me?”

“I have news about Robbie.”

I practically fly into an upright position. My heart can’t take any bad news. Not today. I don’t want to know.

“What about Robbie?” I ask.

“Adele, he never left France.”

Unable to speak, I vigorously shake my head, as if that might make Robbie’s death untrue. How could he not have made it out of France? Why couldn’t they get him home safely? I want to scream at Denise to take it back.

She runs to my side, crying, “No, no, no!” She lifts my chin, forcing me to look at her through tears. “He hasn’t died! He’s still here in France.” She hugs me to her, patting my back. “My God, what have I done to you? This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen. Couldn’t you tell the big news was happy news from my ear-to-ear smile?”

“So”—I choke out—“he’s alive?”

“He is.” Denise raises her eyebrows, frowning with nervous uncertainty. She has more to say, but her big news announcement didn’t go the way she planned. Now she’s not sure how to continue. Finally, she blurts, “Would you like to see for yourself?”

I take a ragged breath, sniffling. “What do you mean?”

“He’s here. Downstairs in the front lobby. He came to find you, Adele.”

My mind reels. Robbie is here. Downstairs. A single floor away from me?

I look down at my weakened arms. The two unsightly fingernail nubs on my right hand. The nightgown I wear so often it must smell as bad as the grubby blanket my youngest cousin totes everywhere.

I don’t want Robbie to see me this way. Dr. Devereux removed the large gilded mirror from the hallway outside my room, but once in a while I accidently spot my reflection in a storefront window or Denise’s round makeup mirror. I know what I look like.

“Denise, I’m scared.” I grab my handkerchief from the nightstand. “I do want to see him, but it’s been months. What if everything’s different?” My voice catches in my throat. “Everything
is
different.”

“Would you rather wait until you feel healthier?”

“No, I want to see him,” I say. When Denise turns to leave, a rush of panic compels me call her back. “Wait, Denise. Would you comb my hair for me?”

She spins around. “Of course!”

She runs the comb through my hair again and again, easing out the tangles until shiny waves fall past my shoulders. At least one part of me has returned to normal.

“Sit tight,” she says. “I’ll go get him.”

The next minutes of waiting give me more anxiety than I felt some days in prison.

Heavy footsteps slowly climb the staircase. Is he as nervous to see me again as I am to see him? The footsteps quicken. He’s running now. I almost can’t stand to keep my eyes open. And then, there he is, and I can’t look away. Within the past four months, the boy I was expecting has been replaced by the tanned, rugged man who stands in the doorway.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi.” I smile so hard I fear my face might break. “You look so … different.”

“You look just the same. I’ve thought of that smile every day. I knew I’d see it again.”

He might look more rugged, but underneath he’s still the same sweet boy.

“Come here. Come sit down,” I say, excitedly waving him over to the bedside chair. “How come you didn’t leave France?”

“It’s a crazy story, Adele. You probably won’t believe me.” He sits in the chair and leans forward. “My handlers got an urgent message from London that the invasion was close. All evacuation plans had to be stopped immediately. The Resistance had more important things to do than transport guys like me who had the bad luck to be shot down. So they took me to a camp. Do you know where Freteval Forest is?”

“Yeah, sure I do. I stayed at a farmhouse near there.”

“That’s where I spent the last few months, along with more than a hundred and fifty other downed pilots. We lived in the woods, right under the noses of the Germans.”

My mouth drops open. “But that area must have been swarming with Germans after D-day. You lived in those woods without being seen or heard?”

“I guess it was the last place the Germans expected anybody to hide, right inside the lion’s den,” he says. “And we had two strict rules. Never make a break to get back to Britain on your own, and never raise your voice. The camp was smack-dab between German ammo caches. Patrols went past every fifteen minutes. Some days, none of us dared speak above a whisper.”

I shake my head in awe. “Those must have been frightening months, for all of you.”

“What we were doing was dangerous, but believe it or not, we were bored. We spent a lot of time lying around in the sun, swapping stories and jokes. Then, in the middle of July, a couple of the guys came up with the great idea to start Freteval Country Club, so we got busy whittling golf clubs and balls. We had tournaments and everything.”

“C’mon,” I say, playfully smacking his arm. “Now you’re really pulling my leg.”

With the boyish grin I love so much, he says, “I swear to you, Adele, every word is true. I know I called it a camp, but it was much more than that. We had our very own secret village in those woods until the Allies liberated our camp on August thirteenth. That day was one of the happiest of our lives, let me tell you.”

Robbie’s fascinating story trails away. His healthy tan seems to fade from his face.

“Robbie, what’s the matter?”

“Here I am babbling like an insensitive jerk about how much fun I had living at Freteval. God, I’m sorry, Adele.”

“Robbie, no, I want to hear all about it,” I say, reassuring him with a smile.

“Denise told me what happened. It just about killed me to hear how those men hurt you. They hurt
you
, Adele, the most wonderful girl I’ve ever known—” His voice catches as he says, “And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.”

His arms engulf me in a hug. He brought the warmth of the sunny summer day inside with him. I cling to him with all my strength, not wanting to let go. I think about Robbie hiding out in a forest camp, like Pierre and his men, forced by war to live in seclusion and fear. The seclusion and fear was what brought
Pierre and me together. We gave each other security and understanding at a time when we needed them above all else. But as Robbie holds me in his arms right now, I feel more anchored than I have in months; like if he came into my life for good, I might finally be able to let go of my past and move on.

“I’ve missed you so much,” he says in my ear. “Not a day went by that I didn’t think of you.”