Paris 1946
An extract from The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in liberated Europe (Henry Holt and Company, LLC, novembre 2005)
Paula Fox
‘April 2 1943, Los Angeles, California, photo taken from Picture Machine The Rise of American Newspictures by Williamo Hannigan & Ken Johnston, Harry N.Abrams, Inc., Publishers
A year and a few months after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere I went, I sensed the tracks of the wolf that had tried to devour the city. But Paris proved as inedible as it had been since its tribal beginning on an island in the Siene, Ile de la Cité.
I stood on the Champs-Elysées, down which the black-booted Nazis had marched, some with reverence and cultural piety, I had heard, some triumphant, some astonished that they should be in command of the city of light.
But there was little brightness in 1946, except at sunset on a fair day when the last of the sun’s rays struck the roof of Sacré Coeur, and the flying buttresses of Notre Dame, and the spindle top of the Eiffel Tower; except in the bright scarves of the French women who walked swiftly and insouciantly as they went about their daily tasks and errands to the baker, the grocer, the butcher, the open markets that had begun that year to display their wares. Perhaps the women were hoping to find, among the stalls, their former lives. Although there was no bomb damage as there had been in London, the old life of Paris was gone.
When I returned as a tourist decades later, the stairs and corridors of the Louvre flowed with foreign visitors. But in 1946, I was nearly alone in the museum except for a drunk, elderly custodian whose eyes swam toward me every so often, suspicion of me evident in his downturned lips and lifted eyebrows, as though I might try to steal the Mona Lisa, then on the ground floor, or the Winged Victory of Samothrace that stood at the top of a long flight of white marble steps.
I found a pension on the rue de Longchamps, and made arrangements for a room. It was cheerless, shabby and barely heated.
When I returned as a tourist decades later, the stairs and corridors of the Louvre flowed with foreign visitors. But in 1946, I was nearly alone in the museum except for a drunk, elderly custodian
In the evenings I sometimes played bridge with other boarders. I always had the same partner, who seemed determined to keep me seated across the table from her, and requested me, in an ironic voice, to call her Madame. I couldn’t imagine what her irony was about, unless she judged me to be a callous American, or unless it expressed her attitude toward life itself. Then I saw one evening the faded blue tattoo of a number on the inside of her wrist as she dealt the cards. It was the first time I saw such a mark although it was not the last. She was in her thirties, she told me, but she looked at least a decade older.
She didn’t eat her meals on the dishes provided by the pension but transferred the food to a mess kit she had been issued at Dachau, where she had been prisoner for thirteen months, and ate her food hastily with a spoon as though she expected it to be snatched away at any second. She was the only boarder who tied a string around her bottle of wine because, she told me, if someone else in the pension drank from it, she wanted to know. Just that. To know.
From the year I had spent in a Montreal boarding school, I recalled the beautiful French words for card suits: carreau, pique, coeur, trèfle. But I played erratically, unable to concentrate on the cards, too excited, made restless by the city, by my partner’s past, by all the people I had met and would meet. We rarely won.
She appeared to grieve as if more than a game of cards had been at stake. When I bade her goodnight, she would barely respond as she sat slumped in a chair, her eyes shut.
When I had a few francs, I spent them at a café on the Place de Longchamps, a block or so from my pension, where I could order a glass of Beaujolais and a plate of string beans in vinaigrette for the equivalent of fifteen cents. At the lunch hour, I could see through large clear windows people strolling along streets and sidewalks, carrying baguettes. One end of the loaf was always missing, bitten off and eaten by its purchaser, who wanted the pleasure of its freshness, or simply because it was there, a Parisian habit.
Every few days I would mail off a story to the London wire service. Its budget, I had been informed by Sir Andrew, was to low to permit the use of telephones. What expense account I was permitted to list was only for emergencies he didn’t enumerate. In any event, my stories tended toward the picturesque rather than the newsworthy.
The first visit I made to labor attaché at the American Embassy, one of my sources for slow news, I was struck by the radiance of sunlight streaming through the windows that left everything, including him, in darkness. It was only when he strode to the rear of the room that I was able to see him. He was tall and lanky and not quite young, I judged. He reached into a file cabinet, and from an empty space at its back lifted out a carton of cigarettes that he carried back to his desk. He held out the carton and said good morning at the same time.
Cigarettes were quite as valuable as money in that year. One could smoke a few and sell the rest on a flourishing black market.
All I recall from the humdrum conversation was his invitation to accompany him and a few friends who planned a trip to the south of France the coming weekend.
No thank you, I replied, though I was tempted by the resonance of the names and towns and villages, the Rhône Valley, St Emilion, St. Remy, Arles, the Camargue, where he planned to spend a day or so.
A few days later, I met and interviewed a Corsican politician whose exploits in the Resistance were the subject of a cartoon strip sold in all the kiosks of Paris. His name was Jean-Claude. He was tall and slim, dark haired, somber looking, in his early thirties. We fell in love.
Paris proved as inedible as it had been since its tribal beginning on an island in the Siene, Ile de la Cité
In the last months of the war, his wife had been captured by the Gestapo. She was in her seventh month of pregnancy. To force her to reveal his whereabouts, she was beaten with a rubber truncheon on every part of her body. Ultimately, she was released although she had given nothing away. The baby, a boy, was born unharmed.
In the shadow of her monumental heroism and loyalty, there was little enough we could say to one another or do. There was no future, only the past. We told stories of our histories. Our breaths mingling, as we rode the metro under all of Paris. Sometimes he smoked the English cigarettes he preferred to the strong French tobacco. We met at odd hours in small dark bistros where we drank harsh wine. We make quick, intense love in dark courtyards, her bravery never far from our minds. Once, someone saw us embracing against a wall. From his second-floor window, a heavyset, elderly man called our «…honteux!» I wept from embarrassment. He tried to comfort me. It was all hopeless.
Jean-Claude had to return to Corsica for a week. The evening he told me about his brief trip, gripping my hand while he spoke, it was as if our flesh knew a second before we did that we would not see each other again. We withdrew our hands. In an accord that had characterized our relation from its beginning, we parted outside the café where we had met and, walking away from each other on a lamplit sidewalk, we both turned at the same instant to look back at each other. His face was shadowed, as mine must have been, as our faces would be in memory. And I felt, along with the bitter regret I could nearly taste, an unexpected relief as one does after high emotions, a small death, a reminder that one is finally alone.
One evening, the husband of a couple I had interviewed for the news service picked me up in his car at the pension and drove me to their apartment in the Marais to have dinner. The traffic was sparse. As we drove, he told me the sheepskin jacket he was wearing had kept him warm the three years he had spent in a concentration camp. The jacket had holes at each elbow and resembled the brown carcass of an animal that had fought in vain for its life.
He hadn’t been worked to death or gassed. He was a medical doctor and of use to the camp administration. When he pronounced the word administration, I imagined I saw his concentration-camp face for an instant in the dashboard light. Then he regained his present friendly expression.
The large bourgeios flat faced a shadowed interior courtyard. Dinner had many courses, perhaps to make up for the tiny portions. It ended with unexpected opulence, a great wheel of Roquefort cheese from which his wife cut thin slices, their blue-veined surfaces resembling a city map of streets.
At some point, the conversation turned to mutilées. I was startled to learn that in French it meant the wounded. Mutilated had a powerful sense of malice aforethought, infliction on another of savagery and torture. Though the war has ended a year earlier, the trains still returned the mutilées to Paris. After that evening, I watched for soldiers walking with canes or splints or bandages wrapped around their heads like turbans. For a few days, the English meaning of the word refused to give way to the French; perhaps it was because they were both true of soldiers.
I had occasion to take a taxi somewhere soon after my dinner in the Marais. Once he knew I was American, the driver told me two stories in a voice filled with animus. Grosses enfants he called American soldiers stationed in France after the war, as a preface to describing how they threw hand grenades at barns or farmhouses from their jeeps as they drove aimlessly about the countryside of France, indifferent to the lives of those within. He may have sensed my disbelief because he amended his tale by adding that the soldiers might have judged the farmhouses deserted.
The second story concerned a stranded American climber in the Alps. The United States Army sent in a train full of GIs at the base of the mountain, along with a restaurant car and medical personnel. Meantime, a lone Swiss climber had gone up the mountain, rescued the climber and brought him down to safety.
In early November, a group of journalists, I among them, was chosen to take a trip by train to the northwest coast of France. We were to spend one night a Mont St. Michel, then go south to St. Malo and Dinan, everything paid for by the government.
A dozen or so of us boarded a cone-car train, crates of champagne stacked up on the back platform rattling as the train moved out of the station. On board were Russians, two guarding a third – the son of Marsahl Zhukov, who had defeated the Germans at Stalingrad and lifted the siege at Leningrad in World War II. His son was tall and homely. His skin was khaki colored, and whenever our glances crossed he grinned hugely and even waved, though I was sitting nearby. It was an odd sight to see his large hand bending its fingers, the cuff of his uniform unmoving as though he were made of cement.
There were a few Americans, among whom was Nick, a United Press journalist I had become friendly with; several English people; a boy of nineteen whose pants, I noticed, were held to his waist by a large safety pin. His jacket was far too thin for the cold weather. His expression was one of sullen disregard for the rest of us; I had the sense it was a perpetual expression except when he slept, always provocative, although he appeared too weak to provoke anyone.
Nick informed me he knew that the boy had been a member of a fascist youth organization in Hungary, the Arrow Cross. How he’d made his way from there to Paris and the peace conference, then onto this train, Nick couldn’t explain.
We spent our first night at La Mère Poularde, an inn with a restaurant on the main street of Mont St Michel. The restaurant’s speciality was a seemingly endless variety of omelettes cooked over a narrow stone trench of flame in a kitchen as large as the dining room. But unlike the latter, it had a sixteenth-century look, an impression strengthened by the cook’s long muslim dress and head wrap, and the massive wooden door behind her with its ponderous, regal, iron hardware. In the dining room were several tables, each with a candle in a glass cup, and one wall of glass behind which stood two thick-trunked living trees in leaf.
Nick, sitting across from me, told a story about a man who had gone to a New Jersey airport, chosen a ramp, and run down it, flapping his arms to fly to the Paris peace conference, where he intended to say a few rebarbative words to the delegates. Everyone who understood English laughed except the Arrow Cross youth and Zhukov’s son, both of whom ate steadily, not looking up at anyone.
I began to think of the narrow street outside curving like a nautilus shell on its way up to the eighth-century Gothic abbey, which we had toured earlier that day. I had passed an oubliette, a cell in the ground. Weeds grew around its iron grill. Prisoners would have to had crouched; the idea was harrowing, and I felt a moment of claustrophobia when I thought of soft human flesh being stuffed into such a narrow burrow for months and years.
The entrance to the fortress-like abbey had been shrouded in darkness. I stood at the great doors watching as visitors took careful steps into the interior, just as I had seen the local people do. The French of Mont St Michel gathered seaweed from the sea shallows and had learned over generations to avoid the patches of quicksand for which that part of the coast was known.
After dinner, I made my way back to the abbey. I reached the great back-spired hulk and realized the Hungarian boy was a few yards behind me. I turned to see him. He stood unmoving, his head bent, his hands in his trouser pockets. I walked to the rocky outcrop and he followed me, always maintaining the same distance between us. I saw how his torn shirt collar played against his cheek. He began to speak, not with me but at me, in his limping French. I understood enough of what the wind left of his words to realize he was talking about his short past, the excitement in his voice quickened, I guessed, by the blowing wind and the height we stood upon, and the starlight glinting on the surface of the water far below.
He didn’t speak of Jews or Gypsies or homosexuals but only of executions he had witnessed, as if they had been the romance of his life; but it was all over now, he had no place to go, no place to be. He didn’t care what happened to him. When he grew silent. I walked away, down the long winding street, back to the inn.
The tide was low when we boarded the small buses to return to the mainland where our train awaited us.
In St. Malo, the mayor had given us an afternoon party in a small villa on a bluff overlooking the sea. A German blockhouse rose on the beach, and I stood in it for a few minutes staring at the wall I faced. It was covered of graffiti in German or French. An empty blue pack of Gauloises lay crumpled on the cement floor along with debris left by high tides.
Chilled to the bone by the sea wind, as well as memories not my own, perhaps from war movies I’d seen, I returned to the villa, where a man was waiting for me at the salt-air-ravaged hedgerow.
«There’s someone who would like to speak to you,» he said, waving at a bit of cultivated ground just behind him. «He’d like to ask you a few questions about your country.» I walked into the autumnal garden. Leaning on a birdbath was one man with one eye that wandered. He wore glasses. During our brief conversation, there was a suggestion about him of having always looked the same age.
There were thawing fragments of dirty ice in the birdbath. I noticed his ungloved left hand clutching its rim.
He grew aware, at last, that I was shivering and led me back to the living room of the villa. I heard his name murmured by someone, Jean Paul Sartre. I had heard of him, vaguely, and I cursed myself for foolishness, recalling how knowledgeably I had spoken about the United States – expecially California, about which he had asked many questions – of which I was so ignorant.
Nick rolled his eyes when I described to him how I had held forth to Sartre. «Him big cheese in some circles,» he commented.
Marshal Zhukov’s son strode in a military fashion across the room to me, his bodyguards, resembling fire hydrants, striving to keep up with him on their short, stubby legs. Bowing too often, Zhukov invited me to visit him in Moscow where he then lived. I smiled and replied with an elaborate refusal, which he mistook, I think, for yes. Then I bowed and he bowed, and the whole thing became a tangle through which I finally made an escape.
I returned to Paris, my work done, slight though it had been.
I said adieu to a woman friend, Lucienne. She stood on the pavement beside a grand boulevard, her beret askew from our embrace a second earlier. I was returning to London to be reassigned to Poland.
On my last evening in Paris, I took a walk on the Left Bank. The streets were nearly empty as I neared Les Deux Magots café.
Suddenly from out of the shadows a figure approached me. The weak street lamp made her hair a halo. She was carrying in one hand a glass of white wine.
It was Maggie L., whom I’d last seen in New York City in a sublet on the East Side. She had been holding a cocktail glass then, with the remains of a martini in it. I had stopped by to see her the day before she was to return to her home in London. Strewn around her had been opened boxes of clothes and handbags and shoes. She was smiling, her handsome face triumphant, yet with a touch of rue, as she told me how she had charged all the things – she gestured towards the loot – around us and she was skipping out on the bill that would come at the end of the month. She laughed and toasted the air and drank down the rest of the martini.
The world was different then in so many significant or trivial ways. One was how easily you could escape your bills if you left the country where you owed them. She had been so merry and winsome that day, her blond curls framing her face, drinking gin, her stolen goods spread on furniture and tables about the room. Somehow she managed to look sleek and disheveled at the same time.
But for me the stealing had been repulsive, and my face may have shown it.
«Don’t think about it for another second,» she said. «Pretend I pay cash.» But I couldn’t not think about it.
Now she was walking toward me, looking like a tarnished angel, from the Deux Magots. She said she’d spotted me from a window in the café. She didn’t ask me one question why I was in Paris.
I had first met her in New York City among a group of communist sympathizers, or fellow travelers, then the wellknown label for them. There had been rumors that she was employed as a spy by British intelligence.
It must have seemed the height of sophistication for me in those days – to meet a beautiful looter, a reputed British agent, in a Paris street at night, with a glass of wine in her hand.
I swallowed the memory of what she had done and what she might be doing, and she held it out, took the wineglass from her hand and drank what was left.
