22 A MIRACLE AROUND EVERY CORNER
22
A M IRACLE A ROUND E VERY C ORNER
Luck.
Michelle’s colleagues at the Galeries Lafayette spoke about it often during the long hours no one passed through the shop. On the women’s floor, the shop assistants, with their blue uniforms and their hair pinned up according to the employee manual, chatted because, in some way or another, they needed to kill time. Chatting helped distract them from the misery of the streets, the heavy sadness, and the uncertainty that had suddenly invaded their families. They spoke of chance and concluded it had a crueler side to it during times of war. Between life and death, there is sometimes a very thin thread of fortune. Loss had reached everyone, but tragedy clung tighter to some more than others. Michelle was the first to recognize she was fortunate her husband hadn’t been recruited to go to the front. At the Chatelet, he, in his electrician’s uniform with a handful of almonds in his pocket, could act like the war lived only in the margins of his workday. Ferdinand had been left alone during the Germans’ visits to the theater. The husbands of three of Michelle’s colleagues, however, had left home because France called them to stand up against the devil. There are levels even of bad luck.
Nathalie—foulards, scarves, and accessories—knew her husband had been sent somewhere close to Tours, and sometimes, maybe once a week, she received a letter written in soldier’s ink. Nathalie figured he was telling her lies to keep her from worrying. At the end of every letter, which seemed shorter every week, he ended with a great truth: “I love you.” And she became just as emotional when she read every letter. What a strange combination yearning and fear create when they mix.
Marion, who was in charge of intimate wear, didn’t know where Romain was. “Join the front” was the slogan men repeated to one another before June. And Romain, a coward of sorts, wasn’t brave enough to hide himself. He thought it would be worse to escape and resigned himself to his fate. It was clear what it would be. He put on his military outfit, looked at himself in the mirror in the foyer of the house, and with the cries of a small child, he collapsed to the floor, saying he didn’t want to go. He had a hunch the Germans would enter whenever they felt like it and that they would triumph the way they had at Verdun in 1916. He saw the big wave coming to swallow them up and knew it was impossible to escape it. He was convinced that he, weak of body and spirit, wouldn’t make it to Christmas, and he started crying again. Marion’s words of hope didn’t console him. Nor did her caresses. When the soldiers passed by to pick him up from the doorway of his house and loaded him onto the gray truck, he didn’t have the energy to even raise his hand and wave at his wife, who was still cheering him on and saying, “Everything will be okay, Romain. You’ll see.” She hadn’t heard any news since he’d left six months ago. “Pas de nouvelle, bonne nouvelle,” Marion repeated in front of her coworkers to avoid tormenting herself.
Without a doubt, Marthe had been the one who suffered the most with the Nazi occupation. She’d become a widow only two months after getting married. She’d mourned at work, and it turned her stomach when she had to attend to the swastika-clad soldiers, who acted friendly while placing an order for a skirt for their wives. She could’ve vomited on them. Her husband, Frédéric, may God forgive him, hadn’t resigned himself to the idea that Hitler’s assassins were the new overlords of Paris. What were they trying to prove with the daily martial parades down Champs-élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to the place de la Concorde obelisk at noon? Why did French boys everywhere all of a sudden want to be German soldiers when they played war?
One August night, Frédéric left the house, defying the 11:00 p.m. curfew. Even though Marthe had asked him to please not violate the orders of confinement and to stop acting like a hero, he insisted he needed to get some fresh air. He said, “I’ll go only as far as les Invalides, and I’ll turn back. I won’t run into anyone.” They kissed, and she never saw him again. What had he done? What was he carrying? Who had he run into? Why hadn’t he returned that night? She would never know. At the first hints of light, Marthe went out in search of him, hoping for a miracle around every corner that never materialized. She wasn’t able to find him. The nightmare continued, and she cursed herself for not having stopped her hero. As if the three days of worrying over Frédéric’s disappearance wasn’t enough, the way she’d found out about his death was even more devastating. On her way home from the Galeries Lafayette, Marthe saw her husband’s name, Frédéric Rameau, on a poster hanging on a streetlamp near the German Kommandatura on the avenue de l’Opéra. His name was in the middle of seven others, all men. The sign was in German, and Marthe didn’t understand what it said. She didn’t want to ask the men in green uniforms acting as guards five doors down with their cigarettes. She stopped passersby, each in their own world, coming and going from the Palais-Royal. Disoriented, she asked all of them the same question:
“Pardon me, do you speak German?”
Some said no, others didn’t answer, some even turned their heads away, which was a way of saying, “Don’t get me involved in this war.”
“Pardon, do you know what it says here?” Marthe asked the question again. “Pardon, do you speak German?”
She continued to ask. Men or women, she grabbed them by the elbow. Even more desperately each time. A pedestrian, a big man who’d avoided running into her, looked at the notice as he continued to walk.
“It says ...” With one glance, he’d seen enough. “That they’ll be executed today.”
She never found out what had happened that night. No one told her how they’d arrested him. Or if he’d resisted. If he’d tried to contact her. She didn’t even know what happened to the body of her beloved Frédéric, blown to pieces by the bullets. The absence of details is another form of torture during war.
In spite of her despair, Marthe hadn’t missed a day of work, due to the absolute madness of having to pretend like nothing had happened and so that they wouldn’t implicate her in who knows what charges. Upon discovering the news, her boss patted her on the back and asked her to please fix herself up because she was looking pale. It was a company order. “Put on makeup, be as pretty as you can, and most importantly, smile at everyone no matter who they are. People are having a hard time out there. Every client who steps inside our store should enter a small oasis. Misery, hunger, and emaciated faces have no room here.”
Michelle, Nathalie, Marion, and Marthe dressed up every day. Then, when fall began to turn into winter, Marion showed them a trick for saving on tights. She took off the uniformed pumps and placed her foot on the top of the stool behind the counter.
“What color would you like your tights to be?” Marion asked.
“Nude,” said Michelle.
“So what you do is grab black eyeliner, and you’ll have them in no time.”
Carefully, Marion took off the cap and drew the straightest line she could muster up the back of her leg from her heel to the fold of her knee. She stood so they could see.
“Compare one leg to the other. Doesn’t this one look like it has a tight on it?”
“Definitely.”
“And if the tights are supposed to be black?” Nathalie asked, not so convinced by this invention. “Your leg would look white, and you’d have a black line on your calf.”
“Girls, I also have a trick for that. Smear a little bit of Elizabeth Arden lotion to darken your legs, then draw the vertical line, and you have black silk tights. Impeccable.”
“Of course, these tights won’t rip.”
“Not a run in your tights, I guarantee it. Cheap and, listen, they’ll last you your whole life.”
“That’s until you take a bath.”
“You’re a good saleswoman, Marion.”
All four burst into laughs and began to fantasize what color they’d paint their legs for different occasions. Once this was all over, of course, because no war lasts forever.
Damien arrived at Montmartre, his shirt sweaty. As bundled up as he was, the walk from the Chatelet had taken its effect. He double-checked that the building on the corner of rue Chappe and rue Tardieu was the house belonging to Ferdinand Dutronc’s family.
He rang the doorbell for the fifth-floor apartment. After a couple moments of silence, he heard someone shouting to him from the sky.
“Damien. Up here.”
He looked up, and despite the darkness, he saw Margaux leaning out the window, waving to him discreetly.
“Is it locked?”
“Yes, yes,” he responded after pulling at the door.
“Give me a second.”
She disappeared inside and immediately returned with a rope. With the skill of having done this many times before, she snaked it down the building’s facade in a zigzag motion. A key was tied to the very end.
“You’re lucky your father is a handyman,” Damien shouted as he waited for the rope to reach him. “It’s the fifth floor, right?”
“The very top floor, yes. I’m sorry.”
Damien climbed the steps two at a time. Following an afternoon of rehearsals and traversing half of Paris, he still had some energy. It was the hope of a new challenge. He was about to give his first oboe lesson to a girl who’d hardly even held one before in her hands. On the way to Margaux’s home, he came up with twenty different ways of starting out. Once he was upstairs, he chose one.
“Close your eyes.”
Sitting at the table where she ate dinner with her parents every day, Margaux listened to him. Damien placed the case in front of her, opened it, grabbed his new student’s hands, and put them on the pieces of his treasured instrument.
“Let’s see how many parts you find.”
“Oof. This one is ...” She felt a round-necked tube.
“Try doing it carefully. I’ll hold it. Come on.”
“This one is longer, right?”
“Correct. The lower body is the longest. Don’t open your eyes. I’m watching you.”
“No, no.”
“You’ve got one left.”
“This one ... it’s the shortest. Could it be?”
“The upper body. Yes, ma’am. Don’t open them yet.” Damien put the instrument together in no time. “Open your eyes.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Margaux.
“That’s the oboe.”
“It’s a work of art.”
“People see it like this, as one piece, but it’s important you know it comes in three parts. The upper body, the lower body, and the bell that rounds off the sound, which is the first part you took out.”
“It’s fabulous.”
“We wouldn’t be able to clean it if it didn’t come in three parts. And it’s essential to clean it after playing. This is all wood. If we don’t open and dry it every time, the moisture in our breath can damage it right away. The wood can rot, and ... And this oboe should last for several years, maybe for my entire life. Here, do you want to hold it?”
She didn’t hide her joy at having the oboe in her hands. She held it with the same care as she would a baby who belongs to someone else. Damien showed her how it functioned: his right hand placed under, supporting the weight of the instrument, and his left hand over the oboe to play the keys at the very top.
“There are twenty-three keys. And each finger is used ... except for one. Which one, do you think?”
She thought about it.
“The thumb, this one.” Margaux wriggled her right-hand thumb.
“Exactly, because it stays underneath and holds up the oboe. So now,” Damien said, surprised at how he was shaping up to be as a teacher, “do you think the instrument could be played this way? Would you be able to play it?”
“Me ...? Oh wow ...” She looked at the instrument from top to bottom. “I don’t know. It’s missing ... the little tongue. So that it plays.”
“Brava, Margaux! There’s a fourth part, which is the smallest and most important of them all. What you call ‘the little tongue’ is actually the reed.” He took one out of the pocket of the case. “This is for you. The reed is the primary element. Without it, the oboe couldn’t be played. It’s the link between you and the oboe. It goes in like this, see ...”
Damien grabbed the instrument, and with the steadiness of a surgeon’s hand, he inserted it into the socket. Only the tip of the reed stuck out.
“You can put it in your mouth. No one’s used it before you. One second—” He stopped her suddenly. “My first piece of advice is to always hide your teeth. My second piece of advice is to round your lips into the shape of an m ... Very good. Now, little by little, pinch your lips halfway up the reed.”
“Like that?”
“Perfect. Pinch the reed without completely closing your lips, so sounds can go through. And now release some air. Can I show you a trick?”
“Of course.”
“Try to blow out air in a very thin, concentrated, and tubular stream, and it’s also important to do it with a lot of velocity; if not, it won’t play.”
She tried it. Margaux couldn’t do it at first. She moved the chair back to be more comfortable, concentrated hard, and tried again. Her heart was beating quickly like she was going in for her first kiss. Still, she continued once more to channel the air precisely.
“Blow the air with more velocity. Try orienting it more.”
Suddenly a sound escaped. The first sound was the antithesis of music. She withdrew the oboe from her mouth and laughed shyly like she’d performed a grand concert. Damien stood and shook her by the shoulders to congratulate her.
“You can now say you’ve played the oboe.”
“Oh, of course,” she responded sarcastically.
“The distance between what you’ve heard and Albinoni’s Concerto no. 1 is not so vast.”
After, they took the reed out, left the oboe on the table, and spent the rest of the afternoon working on a single thing: practicing with the reed. Each used their own reed. Damien would make a sound, and Margaux had to copy him. Sometimes it was low, sometimes it was high, one would be short, and one he’d hold for a while to see how long she could maintain it without getting dizzy. When a ridiculous vibration or a screech that sounded like a balloon losing air would escape, they laughed. Margaux never would have thought the delicate piece, smaller than a cigarette and resembling a toy whistle, was what made the instrument she’d fallen in love with play.
By the time Damien left the apartment, Ferdinand still hadn’t arrived home. Halfway down the stairs, he crossed paths with a woman going up, and he said good night to her.
“Good night,” she responded. “There’s so little light in this stairway.”
Her open coat revealed the sight of her blue uniform. From that, he knew she worked at the Galeries Lafayette. He guessed she must be Michelle, Ferdinand’s wife. It was the first time he’d ever seen Margaux’s mother. They bore a strong resemblance. If he squinted, he could see what Margaux would look like when she got older. All of a sudden, Damien knew all the members of the Dutronc family.
Violin case in his lap, Imtold Lefebvre waited for the darkness of night. He’d left the rehearsal, said goodbye to Damien, who mentioned he was heading to Ferdinand Dutronc’s house, and walked all the way to place de la Sorbonne. It wasn’t far from the theater. Once there, he sat on a street bench in front of the German bookstore. Throughout the afternoon, he observed the little movement there was on the corner of boulevard Saint-Michel. In over an hour, he’d seen only two soldiers and a man of around sixty enter the bookstore. Just by looking at the man’s rounded figure, Imtold guessed he was a Pétain supporter, a slave to the conquerors, a traitor like so many he’d begun to see settling for the status quo. He’d likely entered the shop to buy a German book, despite not speaking the language, that would serve as a sort of safe passage if he ever ran into problems. The pair of soldiers left after ten minutes, each with a volume tucked under their arm. Once they were on the street, the taller one let out a large belch and mentioned he’d let a friend from the regiment borrow the book.
“Borrow? I’ll rent it out,” the other said, waving the air with his hand. “I bought it to conduct business.”
Imtold didn’t see what he’d bought, but he’d studied long enough in Leipzig to understand what the pair of Kartoffeln had said. They were the last two people to leave before a blond man—practically albino—turned out the lights, exited the shop, lowered the blinds, and, using a key, locked the bookstore with its two-window displays on each side of the door. Imtold had monitored for enough days to see that the shop windows, same as the store, displayed only German books. To annoy people. To serve as a reminder that the tables had turned in Paris. To demonstrate they’d conquered the cultural capital and were pissing all over it. To show they were the owners of the world. These were the thoughts that gnawed at Imtold and his roommate, Samuel Bardollet, who’d also spent time surveilling movement, but from the other side of the square.
When the city was silent, when the blond manager had certainly arrived home, when he confirmed there was not a soul left in the square, Imtold made the signal Bardollet was waiting for. He whistled the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, and his friend knew the party had begun.
“You or me?” he asked, sitting on the bench next to Lefebvre.
“You place it, and I’ll keep a watch. We settled on that, didn’t we?”
“Yes.”
“So don’t change the plan now.”
“Is it ready?”
“What do you think?”
“Are you nervous? What’s wrong with you?”
“No. But stop nagging me, you hear?”
“You think it’s time?”
“It’s now or never, Samu.”
“If they catch us ...”
“There’s no danger now. Do exactly what I said. We haven’t done all this so that now ...”
“Understood. I’ll place it, activate it, and leave toward Vaugirard.”
“And I’ll head behind the university.”
“I’ll see you at home.”
“Good luck, friend,” Imtold Lefebvre said, before opening his violin case.
Samuel Bardollet took out a small explosive. With the nimble fingers of a violinist, Imtold Lefebvre stripped the wires and twisted it with another wire he’d frayed at home. He had a bomb in his hands in no time.
“Now, be careful,” he said, handing the explosive to Samuel as carefully as someone passing a crying baby.
Imtold closed his case, stood, and, pretending like nothing had happened, walked with his back toward the bookstore.
“Run, Samuel, run ...”
Short-legged Bardollet approached the store, his heart beating a million miles a minute. He placed the bomb at the foot of the door, calculated that he had a twenty-second margin, and ran like he was possessed. He ran and counted. Nine-ten-eleven. He had enough time to leave the square and get to Vaugirard. When he was around sixteen-seventeen-eighteen-nineteen , the sharp din of the explosion threw him half a meter off the ground.
The sound of glass shattering echoed throughout the whole neighborhood. Only one of the windows remained intact. The door and the other three windows were blown to pieces. Immediately, all the dogs in the area began barking.
Mission accomplished.
“Those sons of bitches can go fuck themselves.”
He didn’t think anyone had seen him.
Luck.